Federal revenues in November rose $23 billion to $275 billion, a 9% increase from a year earlier.
Outlays jumped $88 billion to $589 billion, 18% higher than a year earlier. Interest payments on U.S. government debt accounted for $25 billion of the increase.
The outlay for interest on the debt in November, at
$80 billion, surpassed the$66 billionoutlay for national defense, which was up $8 billion from a year earlier. The outlay for the government-run Medicare health insurance program also rose by $8 billion, to$93 billion, while the outlay for the government-run Medicaid program for the poor and disabled climbed $2 billion to$50 billion.
TFW your interest payments approach medicare spending
The weighted average interest rate on the $26 trillion of outstanding Treasury securities rose to 3.10% last month from 2.22% in November of last year.
Seems nice in 
sense, if fed won't drop interest rates in the next year, libertarian bugbear about deficits will come closer to fruition
Why would the government need to tax the money back if the Federal Reserve can create money out of thin air?
I think the answer is to control the amount of inflation. This explains why we saw high inflation after they turned the printer on overdrive. And they can't just tax half of all money created back so they use other methods like increasing the interest rate. Higher interest rates means more incentive to save and fewer new loans therefore less new money being created.
But I'm no expert so please correct me if I'm wrong
The government needs taxation because it is drives the value of the (fiat) currency.
Think about it this way: why people would want to use your country’s currency in the first place? Why don’t every country simply use US dollar? Why don’t every country use gold? Why don’t everyone use the Hexcoin that I just minted billions of them digitally?
The reason is simple: to be a resident of that country, you have to pay taxes in the currency that the state demands. This means everyone will have to earn that currency in some way. The state will print that currency to purchase whatever it needs. The companies that sell stuff to the government will now earn that currency that state printed out of thin air. They will then pay wages and their suppliers in the same currency that they just earned from the state, which was created out of thin air. Keep propagating and now everyone in the country has some means to earn the state-issued currency, which they then use to pay taxes (returning some of your money to the state).
If you fail to pay your taxes, you get punished, and having your assets confiscated etc. This is what drives the value and demand of the currency.
So, a bunch of junk papers suddenly become a valuable item simply because you have to pay taxes with them. Simply because the state coerces you to.
Now, a VERY important concept to keep in mind: taxation and taxes are two separate things! The very act of taxation infuses the currency with value (makes them valuable), but the government doesn’t need taxes (the amount of money you pay back the government every year when you file your tax return) to fund their spending.
In other words, the power of taxation by the state drives the value of the currency. But, when you pay your taxes, that money simply get deleted. The state doesn’t need to earn your taxes to pay for itself. The state is the authority that created the money in the first place.
However, neoclassical school of economics teach that the state needs to earn revenues from taxes in order to fund their spending, which if you have understood the concepts above, is obviously wrong. Neoliberalism doesn’t want government to spend too much because the deficit (extra money created) will inevitably increase the income of the working class, and this is bad for neoliberalism because it means people need to take on less debt, and thus bad business for the financial sector. Unfortunately most governments in the world still adhere to this faulty thinking and they are all acting, consciously or not, in the interest of the bourgeoisie and the Western imperialists.
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Now, let’s go back to your original question, and assume that some governments are ready to abandon neoclassical austerity. In this case, why would the government want to tax the money back? Again, once you have understood the concepts above, the answers become clear.
First, to take out excess currency in circulation because if you have too much money relative to the availability of labor, resource and technology of your country (i.e. productive capacity), then everything simply becomes more expensive (inflation) because the people have more money to spend but not enough productive capacity to satisfy those demand.
Second, to reduce wealth inequality. Rich people who disproportionately benefit from the system should pay a disproportionate amount of taxes - not because the government needs billionaires to fund their spending, but because the government can do that and they want to do that and they don’t want the billionaires to have excessive influence over the people.
Third, to shape behavior. For example, let’s say the state doesn’t want people to smoke, you can tag on extra tax on cigarettes to discourage smoking. Another example, let’s say the state wants to encourage green energy transition, so they can exempt EVs and green technology from additional taxes they can impose on to the fossil fuel sector.
As you can see, taxation is a tool that can be used to achieve specific socio-economic policies the government wants, but it is not needed to fund government spending as neoliberals would like you to believe.
Thanks for the detailed response! I didn't think of the demand creation aspect. So inflation does play a part as well as incentivizing behaviors. And under capitalism, one way of limiting workers spending power to force them to work harder
I’d add that, especially on a local level, there is indeed a need for money to be shuffled around. The lower levels of government can’t print their own money, so the funding has to come from somewhere because, like you mentioned, the people doing the labor to get things done need to pay taxes and buy food. I think of it like if I were to play a chess master. In the same way that entitlements will inevitably be funded by the government, I will lose to the chess master. That doesn’t mean we can just not play the game and skip to the inevitable part. The pieces need to be shuffled around because those are the rules of the game. They’re human-created rules and could be changed, but the chances of a local municipality making sweeping changes to how food stamps are funded is only slightly less likely than me changing the formally agreed upon rules of chess.
Not only that, the federal/central government that creates the money can always pay off whatever financial hole the local government is in. Let’s say you have a state government that hasn’t been able to keep up with its finances (maybe because it is underdeveloped, or maybe there had been a natural disaster that wrecked the local economy), the federal government can always plug that deficit without having to take away from the richer states.
A better analogy is like two friends playing poker. If you are a better player than me, you will probably win more games against me throughout the night, and at some point I’m going to lose all my chips. But, we are not playing for money. We are playing because it is fun. You can always give me back the chips and we resume playing into the night. There is nothing that says we have to stop playing because I have already lost all my money.
uhh what bourgeois dictatorship gives a shit about that?
Obviously this wouldn’t work in a bourgeois society, but that is still how fiat money works and when used properly, it is a very powerful tool to shape the specific socio-economic policies the government wants.
Taxing the money back out of the economy is standard Keynesian methodology for how to fight inflation but it’s literally never been successfully implemented because it’s too politically unpopular for anyone to actually do it