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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.

#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 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!

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

#6
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…

Thank you! I'll add in some tooltips for the items, because you're right, it's hard to know exactly what they entail.

EDIT: Just added tooltips, I'm taking descriptions straight from Wikipedia (usually the first paragraph).

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

#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 ?

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

#10
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…

"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...
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