Editor’s note: When people say it isn’t rocket science, ever wonder what it is that makes rocket science so darn hard? In our Decoder series, Whoopi Goldberg seeks out experts across a wide spectrum of fields to find out how things work, from the encryption on your iPod to the fine print on your tax bill. So next time you see a rocket, don’t be surprised if it’s one Whoopi built herself.

David Cay Johnston is a former writer for The New York Times and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Free Lunch.

WHOOPI: I keep saying, "I don’t mind paying the taxes. I mind that none of them seem to be going towards anything." Where does our tax money go?

DAVID: Well here’s where most of the money is going – a handful of places. Medicare and Social Security are the two biggest expenditures of the federal government, but they’re not funded by income tax; they’re funded by special taxes – the payroll tax that stops at around $100,000 and the Medicare tax. The other two big areas of spending are interest on the national debt, which we already covered. And the other is the military. We still have people collecting pensions and medical benefits from WWII.

WHOOPI: Right.

Click here to see just the numbers, crunched.

Click here to read part one of the Whoopi Decoder series: Whoopi the Decoder Finds Out Why We Get ‘Taxed up the Behind’

DAVID: My dad was a 100 percent disabled veteran of WWII. So I got G.I. Bill benefits up until 1975, to go to college – because I’m treated, technically, as a war orphan. We have an economy that’s over $13 trillion – that’s total output for the year. Take the Pentagon budget, and the interest on the national debt due to wars, past and present, and the Veterans Administration and the Department of Energy, which is mostly bomb making and war, and all the other things that are associated with the military and you’re looking at well north of $1 trillion a year. That’s a big drain on the economy. Roughly, that’s taking a dime out of every dollar of productivity in the system. You know, when Jesse Jackson ran for president back in ‘88, he went around to the Iowa caucuses — where he came in fourth — and he would say to the mostly farmers, "Alright, I want every one of you who owns a VCR put your hand up." And they all put their hand up. And then he said, "Alright, and now every one of you who owns an MX Missile …" and everyone put their hand down. And he pointed out that we make the MX Missile in America but we import the VCRs from Korea and Taiwan.

One of the phrases that I use, Whoopi, is this: Under the rules Congress has set up, if you’re the CEO of a multinational company, then you should be firing American workers as fast as you can and moving your assets and intellectual property out of the United States. And it’s because – and this is the reason for your upset – the whole focus of federal policy is on capital. It’s not on people. Even Andrew Mellon, not exactly a darling of progressives or moderates, said this was wrong. Let me read you something from my current book that he said in 1924. This is when he was Treasury Secretary:

"The fairness of taxing more lightly income from wages, salaries or from investments is beyond question. In the first case, the income is uncertain and limited in duration; sickness or death destroys it and old age diminishes it. In the other, the source of income continues; the income may be disposed of during a man’s life and it descends to his heirs. Surely we can afford to make a distinction between the people whose only capital is their mental and physical energy and the people whose income is derived from investments. Such a distinction would mean much to millions of American workers and would be an added inspiration to the man who must provide a competence during his few productive years to care for himself and his family when his earnings capacity is at an end."