That is the understanding that you've been presented with, likely by people looking to mislead you, but that's not at all what our actual budget reflects. The social safety nets that we supposedly don't have take up around 2/3rds of our federal budget.

As an American, tax dollars are for re-paving the parking lot at our middle school, establishing a water district for our town, buying another school bus, and funding our municipal fire department and ambulance corp.

Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.

66% of Federal spending is on entitlements.