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

wheremymoneygoes.com

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

#21

Post by pkghost »

slug wrote: post #9
theli0nheart wrote: post #2

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…

moral of the (as yet untold) story: rocket science and javascript don't mix.

browser differences aside, javascript represents all numbers as floats, so as you attempt to store larger and larger numbers, you will find yourself with less and less accurate data.

i'd bet that some minor difference in order of operations between the JS implementations of FF and konqueror result in the differences you're observing.

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

#22

Post by higher »

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.

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

#24

Post by higher »

coin wrote: post #19

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.

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

#27

Post by crystalis »

riffer wrote: post #16
slug wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You get the one-two of potential insight into the particular workings and potential 'unintended cool thing'.

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

#28

Post by bprater »

socratees wrote: post #7

Bug: Looks like the text field doesn't handle comma properly. Any character beyond the first occurrence of a comma gets truncated.

Threw me for a minute, too. Suggesting that you regex this field to chop off anything that isn't a period.

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

#29

Post by cbetz »

xenophanes wrote: post #23

wtf are "Miscellaneous mandatory programs" that cost almost as much as social security?

via the google: http://useconomy.about.com/od/fiscalpolicy/p/Mandatory.htm

"These programs include Food Stamps, Unemployment Compensation, Child Nutrition and Tax Credits, Supplemental Security for the Disabled and Student Loans."

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

#30

Post by DevX101 »

riffer wrote: post #16
slug wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Errors at the edge cases are usually the hardest to detect.
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