Facts behind high amount personnel benefits contributions
The federal government’s fiscal year report is related to every taxpayer. It fully and detailedly explains the amount and purpose of each expenditure, so that the public can clearly know what the tax they pay is used by the government. In the analysis of 2021 After the fiscal year report for 2019, I found that the highest government expenditure was actually employee benefits, and the expenditure for this item alone was as high as $76277167.99. I thought that employee wages should be the largest expenditure, so this data is quite suspicious, because it even Exceeding the salary expenditure of employees, the salary expenditure of employees is only 19875017.68, while the expenditure of employee benefits is several times that of salary expenditure. So what is the government doing with this money? In order to know where the government spent this part of the funds, I started to conduct statistical analysis on the data related to employee benefits.
When I analyzed the data related to personnel benefits, I didn’t realize that some of the data were negative (income) at first, so when I initially counted some very strange amounts, such as student loans and student loan payments offset each other part. Therefore, these data cannot be regarded as a summary of expenses. For example, the amount of expenditure and income of health insurance is the same. The difference is that some large-scale expenditures are not balanced, such as: FERS, FERS RAE, FURTHER FERS RAE, MEDICARE, FICA, TSP MATCHING, etc., and these expenditures are used in formal ways, obviously not the key to my doubts, so I changed my mind and decided to see what the most frequent purpose of personnel benefits is based on the number of entries. Therefore, in the second statistics, I removed all negative data, so I got a summary of expenses. In this summary table, I found that student loan appears very frequently, so I made such a pie chart to more intuitively reflect its frequency.
According to the pie chart, we can see that the Student Loan entry accounts for 93% of all entries, and at least 93% of the personnel benefits are spent on student loans, but there are only 28 student loan repayments this year. I think this can be understood as the high demand for student loans reflected in the data. The 2021 fiscal year report actually reflects a social problem: many people feel that tuition fees are a burden, which leads to many people needing student loans. Student loans to pay for tuition. And aside from those normal expenses, I think student loans account for too much of the total expenses, which is why I think this data is very suspicious. At present, higher education resources in the United States are very expensive, and people spend much more on them than their medical insurance. We all know that medical resources in the United States are very expensive, and it seems that educational resources are even more expensive than medical resources. And I don’t think the student loans actually solves the problem fundamentally, it just covers it up. Once due to some other factors, students did not get ideal jobs after graduation (for example, many people lost their jobs at the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic), and it was difficult for fresh graduates to get a job with a good salary at that time, so if there is A similar situation arises, which may make the government’s economic situation worse in the midst of natural and man-made disasters.
Aside from this social problem, I also found some interesting things in this part of the data. The expenditure on pensions of federal employees is also part of the personnel benefits, and this part of the expenditure is even about to catch up with the salary amount of the 2021 fiscal year. , The high benefits of federal employees involve all aspects. Welfare expenses such as student loans, vacation subsidies, travel, and life insurance are not small figures, and even after they retire, they can get a pretty good salary. I thought federal employee benefits were great until I looked up the number of federal employees for the fiscal year. The amount of total expenditure is $76277167.99, and the number of federal employees in the year is 2.85 million people. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/204535/number-of-governmental-employees-in-the-us/)
Therefore The actual per capita dividend is actually very low. And the culprit that caused the anomaly in the data was actually the cost of tuition loans, and the benefits of federal employees were not as good as I thought in the begining.
