April 22, 2011
Want to know where your taxes went?
The creator of the logically-named website Where did my tax dollars go? has provided an award-winning way of presenting data in visual form, a series of pie charts that allow you to burrow down into federal budget, to see (what else?) where your tax dollars went in the FY 2010 budget.
It's incredibly detailed, which also means it's almost indescribably infuriating, too, a window into the waste that occurs when money is harvested, shorn from a docile public, and then given away as if it materialized out of the ether, grew on trees, the pot of gold at the end of an endless, money-producing rainbow.
The debt crisis we're in is existential, a product of out-of-control spending and not a failure to tax rich people enough. If we taxed them at 100 percent, took every last cent of their annual earnings, turned the so-called wealthy into slaves, the confiscated cash wouldn't begin to close the hole in the budget.
I defy you to start sorting through these charts and avoid finding entire areas of government that ought to be shuttered, boarded up and immediately eliminated. We simply cannot spend money we don't have, and we can't tax our way out of this mess.
Posted by Mike Lief at April 22, 2011 07:22 AM
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Comments
Initially, I had an extra zero in that chart and thought they really were good at working the markets... But after getting it all straight, I see my wife and I donated a few hundred dollars to research, so it's sorta like I paid myself to work for a few days.
But then after going a bit deeper, turns out is was closer to a few hours.
Oddly, my largest contributions seemed to go to the "misc." program. Likely that is for heated, butt-washing toilet seats in congressional bathrooms. Cause there's nothing congress loves more...
Posted by: cbeck at April 26, 2011 02:21 PM