Good idea and good instincts. I hope you have a scalable hosting solution, because the presentation and domain name are so well chosen that I can see you getting millions of page landings by tomorrow.
For your own benefit, perhaps some thoughtfully-filtered Adwords or so would help cover those costs and/or make you some ca$h.
For the site itself, keep the simple presentation but perhaps add + signs to allow people to break things out if they wish. Any large program whose share of the budget people love to complain about often turns out to include some things they actually support, so it has excellent education potential.
Discreet links to more advanced presentations like graphs and so forth could later help to build out that initial traffic to become the 'go-to' site for accessible stats, mich like fivethirtyeight.com became well-known for unbiased electoral analysis.
A fun thing might be a time machine that let you look back at tax rates of years past, with the receipt getting increasingly yellowed and/or using more and more antique-looking fonts. By the time you get to 1776 everything is in copperplate :-)
Trying with a value of 1e20 , 1e21 gives interesting results.
More curious is that using konqueror I get one value but with firefox i get another. Seems to be some bit flipping somewhere, since with firefox I get
Miscellaneous mandatory programs $16068258000000004096.00
4096, 16384 , etc
but with konqueror i get:
Miscellaneous mandatory programs $16068258000000005000.00
This is awesome. I passed along that article to some friends, the consensus was "great idea, never gonna happen." Now I get to pass this link along. That makes me :)
Wow, very nicely designed, and I love how fast it is.
Some clarification on a few of the entries would be nice if you have time. For instance, what does "Healthcare" mean once Medicare and Medicaid are excluded? And what's the difference between "compulsory" and "discretionary" spending (when surely the government could eradicate the compulsory stuff if it wanted to). Perhaps you could have explanations of each term if you click on 'em?
Also having "miscellaneous" as the third highest number is a little unsatisfying, can you break that down a bit more?
"There are two types of government spending — discretionary and mandatory. Discretionary spending, which accounts for roughly one-third of all Federal spending, includes money for things like the Army, FBI, the Coast Guard, and highway projects. Congress explicitly determines how much to spend (or not spend) on these programs on an annual basis. Mandatory spending accounts for two-thirds of all government spending. This kind of spending is authorized by permanent laws. It includes "entitlements" like Social Security, Medicare, and Food Stamps — programs through which individuals receive benefits based on their age, income, or other criteria. Spending levels in these areas are dictated by the number of people who sign up for these benefits, rather than by Congress." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#Federal_Spe...
From the Wikipedia link the data's from it looks like "Healthcare" under discretionary spending means the budget of the Department of Health and Human Services. That includes a lot of healthcare research and public-health kinds of stuff, like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH). Also includes some not-really-healthcare stuff, though, like the Office of Civil Rights, and the faith-based initiatives thing that Bush created. And some is more gray area, e.g. the FDA does drug approvals, which is clearly "healthcare", but it also inspects beef, which is good for health but not what people normally think of as healthcare.
I've often wondered what the result would be if budgets were determined by something like that.
Just the line items of potential things to spend money on, and citizens indicating their preferences, without any emotive rhetoric to color their choices.
Since my personal discussions with people end up with a lot of agreement on how much one should be allocating to things like education, R&D, infrastructure and healthcare, but it all seems to go pear shaped when it reaches the voting floor, due to the large role external, non-voting actors can play in shaping those decisions.
I don't want a hundred million here and there to go to rubbish projects as a sop to a politician with a certain amount of influence who just received a donation to add an extension to his house.
Of course, now you have the problem of how things end up on the list to vote on :)
I've wanted that level of civic participation for many years too - but when you think about it, it's only in the last decade that this has become even remotely practical.
But someone should indeed implement such a thing - if they can attract enough traffic, the aggregated preferences would start to become extremely useful, though not always in obvious ways. The only ones I've seen so far tend to be sponsored or created by lobbying groups that want a highlight a particular positive or negative policy outcome - you know, the sort of thing that says 'on current trends, everybody in the US will be employed as a member of the general staff by 2073, and safety razors will have 48 blades.'
...although a recent careless razor purchase turned out to have 6 blades - and I didn't even notice we'd passed 5. So what do I know?
One thing I'd like to see, if possible, is an adjustment to account for deficit spending. In other words, if the government is spending $175 for every $100 collected, adjust the expenses accordingly, so we could clearly see what kind of cuts it would take to balance the budget.
Another suggestion, if you love attention to detail... Rather than having #XXX-XXX as the receipt number, put the IP address in the format of a receipt, that would be a nice touch.
The federal government actually only has about 58-59 cents of revenue for each dollar it spends. It would be slightly more accurate (if extremely inflammatory) to make an applet that generates a receipt for only entitlement spending, as entitlement spending has come within 2% of revenue recently.
The site appears to just linearly scale the results, which is not always correct. For example, Social Security is only collected on the first $106,800 of income.
All social security revenue that is not paid out in benefits is replaced with unmarketable treasury securities and spent as part of the general fund. When social security ceases to run a nominal surplus, the money to pay for those securities will come out of the general fund. As you can see, social security is essentially part of the broader budget, and the divide between its budget and the broader budget is strictly imaginary.
As such I think it is appropriate to calculate FICA spending exactly as the author has.
I need to remember this for the next time someone tells me my desire for lower tax rates means I must not desire roads, police, and fire fighters. It's remarkable how little of the tax burden of a modern state actually goes towards essential services. A modern country could probably be run with single-digit taxes. You would be missing things like a space program, science subsidies, farm subsidies, and socialized retirement insurance, but you could still pay for the rule of law and basic public goods.
Also, does this include recent large one-time stimulus spending bills, or were those in the next fiscal year?
You should change "total" to "subtotal", and have the full total include how much extra you'd have to pay in order offset the deficit. Then at the bottom, "balance outstanding": your share of the public debt.
Ok, just a little fun but for reference here's a comparison of US to UK based on US taxes of $10,000 and UK taxes of about the same (£6,350.50)
The comparison goes roughly like this, obviously the UK figures are less detailed so I've grouped some of the US expenditure where I think appropriate, correct me if you see any errors.
UK: Protection £197.37 ($312.50) - nb. (Includes Police Services, Fire-Protection Services, Law Courts, Prisons,Public Order and Safety)
Total = $312.50
US: Homeland Security $123.76 + Department of Justice $67.31 + Potential Disaster Allotment $30.73
Total = $221.80
=======================================
UK: Transport £161.48 ($255.67)
Total = $255.67
US: Transportation $204.17 + Public Engineering $14.33
Total = $218.50
=======================================
UK: General Government £155.50 ($246.21)
Total = $246.21
US: Department of State $145.26 + Department of Energy $74.05 + Department of Agriculture $73.21 + Treasury $37.45
Total = $329.97
=======================================
UK: Interest Paid £334.92 ($530.29)
Total = $530.29
US: Interest on National Debt
Total = $461.64
=======================================
UK: Other Government Spending £616.02 ($975.37)
Total = $975.37
US: NASA $52.67 + Commerce $38.84 + Labor $37.45 + Natural Parks $33.79 + Environmental Protection Agency $29.57 + National Science Foundation $19.69 + National Infrastructure Bank $14.06 + Community Service $3.08 + Small Business $1.93 + Bureaucracy $1.54 + Everything Else $55.75
Wasn't sure what this included, maybe US readers can shed some light upon how this might relate to the above sections. Obviously the main mismatch is in the other government spending so maybe most of that belongs in there.
Anyway not exactly like for like but may be an interesting excercise.
"These programs include Food Stamps, Unemployment Compensation, Child Nutrition and Tax Credits, Supplemental Security for the Disabled and Student Loans."
I'm not sure where you got the tax rates from, but you almost certainly computed New Jersey taxes wrong. I'm seeing a rate of around 4%, when in truth most people who make anything over $35k pay around 7-11%
[+] [-] theli0nheart|15 years ago|reply
All the calculations are done with Javascript. Let me know what you think!
[+] [-] anigbrowl|15 years ago|reply
For your own benefit, perhaps some thoughtfully-filtered Adwords or so would help cover those costs and/or make you some ca$h.
For the site itself, keep the simple presentation but perhaps add + signs to allow people to break things out if they wish. Any large program whose share of the budget people love to complain about often turns out to include some things they actually support, so it has excellent education potential.
Discreet links to more advanced presentations like graphs and so forth could later help to build out that initial traffic to become the 'go-to' site for accessible stats, mich like fivethirtyeight.com became well-known for unbiased electoral analysis.
A fun thing might be a time machine that let you look back at tax rates of years past, with the receipt getting increasingly yellowed and/or using more and more antique-looking fonts. By the time you get to 1776 everything is in copperplate :-)
[+] [-] slug|15 years ago|reply
More curious is that using konqueror I get one value but with firefox i get another. Seems to be some bit flipping somewhere, since with firefox I get Miscellaneous mandatory programs $16068258000000004096.00 4096, 16384 , etc
but with konqueror i get: Miscellaneous mandatory programs $16068258000000005000.00
Maybe some bug with the javascript interpreter ?
[+] [-] peterbessman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fraserharris|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hugh3|15 years ago|reply
Some clarification on a few of the entries would be nice if you have time. For instance, what does "Healthcare" mean once Medicare and Medicaid are excluded? And what's the difference between "compulsory" and "discretionary" spending (when surely the government could eradicate the compulsory stuff if it wanted to). Perhaps you could have explanations of each term if you click on 'em?
Also having "miscellaneous" as the third highest number is a little unsatisfying, can you break that down a bit more?
But these are nitpicks, nice work!
[+] [-] digitallogic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theli0nheart|15 years ago|reply
EDIT: Just added tooltips, I'm taking descriptions straight from Wikipedia (usually the first paragraph).
[+] [-] SMrF|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theli0nheart|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heresy|15 years ago|reply
Just the line items of potential things to spend money on, and citizens indicating their preferences, without any emotive rhetoric to color their choices.
Since my personal discussions with people end up with a lot of agreement on how much one should be allocating to things like education, R&D, infrastructure and healthcare, but it all seems to go pear shaped when it reaches the voting floor, due to the large role external, non-voting actors can play in shaping those decisions.
I don't want a hundred million here and there to go to rubbish projects as a sop to a politician with a certain amount of influence who just received a donation to add an extension to his house.
Of course, now you have the problem of how things end up on the list to vote on :)
[+] [-] jderick|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|15 years ago|reply
But someone should indeed implement such a thing - if they can attract enough traffic, the aggregated preferences would start to become extremely useful, though not always in obvious ways. The only ones I've seen so far tend to be sponsored or created by lobbying groups that want a highlight a particular positive or negative policy outcome - you know, the sort of thing that says 'on current trends, everybody in the US will be employed as a member of the general staff by 2073, and safety razors will have 48 blades.'
...although a recent careless razor purchase turned out to have 6 blades - and I didn't even notice we'd passed 5. So what do I know?
[+] [-] awakeasleep|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmreid|15 years ago|reply
Found here: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/dlidt/you_want_a_r...
[+] [-] aardvark|15 years ago|reply
One thing I'd like to see, if possible, is an adjustment to account for deficit spending. In other words, if the government is spending $175 for every $100 collected, adjust the expenses accordingly, so we could clearly see what kind of cuts it would take to balance the budget.
[+] [-] Semiapies|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] socratees|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bprater|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karzeem|15 years ago|reply
You did a very nice job with the receipt vibe.
[+] [-] theli0nheart|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simon_|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theli0nheart|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alain94040|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] higher|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] higher|15 years ago|reply
As such I think it is appropriate to calculate FICA spending exactly as the author has.
[+] [-] jacoblyles|15 years ago|reply
Also, does this include recent large one-time stimulus spending bills, or were those in the next fiscal year?
[+] [-] anigbrowl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfranke|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krsgoss|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semiapies|15 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#Bu...
[+] [-] markbnine|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theli0nheart|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossriley|15 years ago|reply
The comparison goes roughly like this, obviously the UK figures are less detailed so I've grouped some of the US expenditure where I think appropriate, correct me if you see any errors.
=======================================
UK: Pensions £1,459.32 ($2,310.61) + Welfare £705.73 ($1,117.42)
Total= $3,4328.03
US: Social Security: $1908.03 + Housing $133.78
Total = $2,041.81
=======================================
UK: Healthcare £1,453.33 ($2,301.13)
Total = $2,301.13
US: Medicare $1274.89 + Medicaid $816.32 + Healthcare $221.62
Total = $2,312.83
=======================================
UK: Education £364.83 ($577.65)
Total = $577.65
US: Education $131.50
Total = $131.50
=======================================
UK: Defence £532.29 ($842.80)
Total = $1,117.42
US: Defense $1869.09 + Veterans Affairs $147.84
Total = $2,016.93
=======================================
UK: Protection £197.37 ($312.50) - nb. (Includes Police Services, Fire-Protection Services, Law Courts, Prisons,Public Order and Safety)
Total = $312.50
US: Homeland Security $123.76 + Department of Justice $67.31 + Potential Disaster Allotment $30.73
Total = $221.80
=======================================
UK: Transport £161.48 ($255.67)
Total = $255.67
US: Transportation $204.17 + Public Engineering $14.33
Total = $218.50
=======================================
UK: General Government £155.50 ($246.21)
Total = $246.21
US: Department of State $145.26 + Department of Energy $74.05 + Department of Agriculture $73.21 + Treasury $37.45
Total = $329.97
=======================================
UK: Interest Paid £334.92 ($530.29)
Total = $530.29
US: Interest on National Debt
Total = $461.64
=======================================
UK: Other Government Spending £616.02 ($975.37)
Total = $975.37
US: NASA $52.67 + Commerce $38.84 + Labor $37.45 + Natural Parks $33.79 + Environmental Protection Agency $29.57 + National Science Foundation $19.69 + National Infrastructure Bank $14.06 + Community Service $3.08 + Small Business $1.93 + Bureaucracy $1.54 + Everything Else $55.75
Total = $125.62
=======================================
Finally: Miscellaneous mandatory programs $1606.83
Wasn't sure what this included, maybe US readers can shed some light upon how this might relate to the above sections. Obviously the main mismatch is in the other government spending so maybe most of that belongs in there.
Anyway not exactly like for like but may be an interesting excercise.
[+] [-] easyfrag|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanalltogether|15 years ago|reply
edit - here you go, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/budget...
[+] [-] xenophanes|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbetz|15 years ago|reply
"These programs include Food Stamps, Unemployment Compensation, Child Nutrition and Tax Credits, Supplemental Security for the Disabled and Student Loans."
[+] [-] nanijoe|15 years ago|reply