Where is All the Money Going?

 I do wonder why no-one has asked the question above before. Where exactly is all the money we give to government going?

Lets let's just step back a few decades, to the 1970s. Back then we paid a smaller proportion of our wage in overall taxation, but we got a lot more in services from the government.

Our armed services were massive. A vast Army was placed in Germany to counteract any threat from The Soviet Union, our Navy had several hundred ships available and on patrol around the World and our Airforce had a large number of aircraft available and several types of aircraft to chose from depending on the role.

We had a Nationalised Railway, Utilities (Gas, Electric, Water, and National Distribution Networks of all of those), a National Health Service, a Welfare System, a Civil Defence Network, etc.

But over the the decades, these have been whittled away. Some more silently than others. 

Gas, Electricity and Water were sold off during the Thatcher years, with the Railways following later.

So, we lost the need to subsidise those industries when they were privatised. Or that should be the case.

The Army, Navy and Air Force have been reduced by each successive Government since the Seventies. The "Peace Dividend" provided by the fall of the Soviet Union was supposed to reduce the cost of employing a standing Army in Germany and "Force Multipliers" in the shape of more capable ships and aircraft in the Navy and Airforce should have also provided benefits as well as general reductions in numbers.

Then we come to the more silent reductions: We used to have a vast Civil Defence Network across the UK in case of War. If the war came home, they would aid the defence of the UK and co-ordinate assets across the country to repel aggressors and also plot the attacks and their aftermath in the case of a nuclear attack. Not that there was much else to do after nuclear Armageddon. 

That whole civil defence network has disappeared. The bunkers are defunct, the communications network closed down and the airspace auctioned off to private companies.

So why I ask, is the tax burden still so high?

If we've sold off all the utilities and their associated liabilities, is we've reduced the armed forces to a fraction of their former strength and we've eliminated an entire civil defence network. All that expenditure is no longer required. 

So why did the tax burden not reduce?

Is the burden of the NHS so great that it's eaten into the spare cash? Is the privatisation of GP services a poorly implemented  attempt to reduce that burden?

Has repaying government borrowing done the same? Have we borrowed so much is using up all that spare cash in repayments?

Are we paying too much to supranational organisations? Are we paying the EU and the UN so much money we've had remove our defensive capabilities to almost zero?

Where exactly is all that money that we did spend on important stuff actually going? 

Or, is it that the tax take has reduced, it's just that wages have shrunk so much the tax burden appears the same or greater than before?

Does anyone have stats on this at all?