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Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.

wheremymoneygoes.com

11–20 of 83 posts

Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.

#12
post #5

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…

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.

Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.

#15
It looks great!

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.

Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.

#16
post #9

I made this last night after being inspired by http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1302494... All the calculations are done with Javascript. Let me know what you think!

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 Maybe some bug with the javascript interpreter…

Why do people always try to break things? This is a serious question pertaining to human nature, not a complaint. I've noticed that anytime I demo something I've built, if the person/people I'm showing have control of the demo they go try to test the outer boundaries of whatever I've built. What makes us want to do that?

Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.

#17
post #9

I made this last night after being inspired by http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1302494... All the calculations are done with Javascript. Let me know what you think!

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 Maybe some bug with the javascript interpreter…

Ah, bizarre. I'll look into it...
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