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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.

#61
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you've been rated down for a reply that does not actually address the comment the parent poster made. Your comment on Social Security accounting (which is correct, as far as I know), has no bearing on the parent's observation that FICA tax doesn't scale linearly - because it is capped at a certain point.

The essential nature of Social Security accounting is such that FICA tax is unrelated to FICA spending. At the moment, much of your FICA tax is spent on general fund items. In the future, much of your income tax will be spent on FICA items.

Thanks for explaining!

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

#63

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!

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…

> 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.

Thanks, I had a feeling people would like this, but had no idea that it'd be this popular. I'm migrating over to Appengine as soon as I can.

> For your own benefit, perhaps some thoughtfully-filtered Adwords or so would help cover those costs and/or make you some ca$h.

I put them up about an hour ago, but took them down because I couldn't see them. Turns out I had adblock turned on. I just pushed ads live.

> 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.

I think these are all great ideas. I do think a site like this is missing, and we could all stand to benefit from it.

> 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 :-)

Hehe, of all the ideas you've had, this is the best. Moving it up in the queue :)

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

#65
post #16
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?

Testing with crazy figures and data makes sense because it can magnify a bug you wouldn't have noticed with normal use. For example you may catch a math error that's only obvious with big numbers.

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

#66
post #31
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I see I have been rated down for posting the truth. If you would like to read about the truth, you can find it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States) "Congress invested these surpluses into special series, non-marketable U.S. Treasury securities held by the Social Security Trust Fund. Under the law, the government bonds held by Social Security are backed by the full faith and credit of the…

US Treasury securities back lots of things, like the majority of the securities market and China. I think they're a pretty safe investment if you're running a surplus and want to stash the money for later payouts.

The "social security money is being taken by the gov't" meme is just so silly - what should they do, put the money in cash in a big vault somewhere?

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

#68
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: 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.

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

#70

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: Pensions £1,459.32 ($2,310.61) + Welfare £705.…

What a potentially interesting feature: switching countries to see what the same tax amount (converted to local currency) buys in other countries
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