PDF version / Image / Source data / FAQ

Three million quid here, £9.3bn on the Olympics there, sixty grand per unspecified number of illegal immigrants, Vodafone dodging nine bajillion pence in tax, gold-plated pensions, gold-plated ministerial toilets…confused? It figures.

Many of the big numbers we’re bombarded by in the media are paid for by ‘the taxpayer’, whoever she is. But taxation is just the collection of money from a large number of people. For example, if everyone in the UK gave me 1p, I’d have £600,000. Actually, could we arrange that?

The sensible way to look at money is in quantities we can all understand: pounds per person per year. Whether it’s running your car, feeding your dog, or invading a Middle Eastern country on a whim, the way we should budget is as individuals, because that’s the scale at which the figures make sense. The Cashogram is our attempt to digest the countless billions blown on medicine and the military in terms of everyday items, like groceries, holidays and computers.

So, if you haven’t already, check it out in PDF or image form. If you’ve got some burning questions you need answering right now, have a look at the FAQ.

Our two cents

The Cashogram contains a veritable stack of stats compiled from official documents, unofficial documents and speculation in the pub, so we’d encourage you to draw your own conclusions, make your own comparisons and conduct your own research. (If you spot anything fascinating, aggravating or wrong, please leave a comment below.) But we’ve spent more hours than is healthy staring at this thing, so here’s some stuff we spotted:

Are benefits well fair, or are pensions a state?

It’s initially surprising (except to Express readers) that the single largest bit of government spending is benefits : a stonking £2800. However, it’s subsequently surprising that half of that goes on a benefit we’d all hope to receive one day—pensions. The fraction spent helping out jobseekers is pretty tiny, especially when you consider how much unemployment there is these days. And while the £30 of defrauded benefits is slightly galling, you probably spend more than that on a month’s dairy products. What?! I like yogurt.

readers) that the single largest bit of government spending is : a stonking £2800. However, it’s subsequently surprising that half of that goes on a benefit we’d all hope to receive one day—pensions. The fraction spent helping out jobseekers is pretty tiny, especially when you consider how much unemployment there is these days. And while the £30 of defrauded benefits is slightly galling, you probably spend more than that on a month’s dairy products. What?! I like yogurt. The most astonishingly expensive benefit is winter fuel , but presumably the quantity of political capital procured with just £50 is worth every penny.

, but presumably the quantity of political capital procured with just £50 is worth every penny. Dodged tax is twenty times more significant than benefit fraud (standing at £600 and £30, respectively). But even if we rugby-tackled all the tax dodgers and benefit scroungers in the land, we still wouldn’t even pay for a quarter of the annual deficit (which is the amount the government overspends compared to the tax it receives: £2,400 each!). The only simple thing about government finances, it seems, is finding a scapegoat.

Bricks and motors

Stop the press: houses and cars cost a fortune! Not exactly front-page news, but it’s pretty surprising when you compare our ready-reckoned cumulative cost of £13,000 to just about anything else in either personal or governmental expenditure. For example, £2000 per person per year for healthcare sounds expensive, until you realise that owning and running the average car is three times pricier. Do we really value driving our bodies around three times more than keeping them healthy enough to bother?

Smokers cough up

Puffing on cigarettes, assuming you don’t import every last smoke duty-free, more than pays for your eventual cost to the NHS. So tobacco tax would appear, depending on the scale of your cynicism, to be somewhere between state nannying and governmental money-spinning.

Science: big bang for your buck

Science is phenomenally cheap. The entire government spend on it is £80. We spend just £10 per person per year on cancer research, even though it’s a disease which will kill around a third of us. And cancer is relatively well-funded—the fact that even this looks so paltry is a stark illustration of just how little we invest in our collective future.

is phenomenally cheap. The entire government spend on it is £80. We spend just £10 per person per year on cancer research, even though it’s a disease which will kill around a third of us. And cancer is relatively well-funded—the fact that even this looks so paltry is a stark illustration of just how little we invest in our collective future. The Manhattan Project cost each and every American just £20 per person per year. Science really is bargainacious: saved from nuclear oblivion at the hands of Johnny Hitler for less than the price of the DVD box set of The World At War .

cost each and every American just £20 per person per year. Science really is bargainacious: saved from nuclear oblivion at the hands of Johnny Hitler for less than the price of the DVD box set of . Cheap though science is, we can’t seem to scrape together more than 30p per year for fusion research—a technology whose successful development would give us near-infinite, clean energy. Obviously it’s not guaranteed to work (cynics would chuckle that it’s been thirty years away for the last thirty years. Ha ha, oh, you cynics, what are you like?), but I’d lob a quid in a bucket on the off-chance, wouldn’t you?

Costing a bomb

The military costs us £750: about the same as an annual foreign holiday for everyone. So, if we halved military spending, we could all invade a foreign country en masse with buckets and spades instead of Tornadoes and assault rifles, every two years.

costs us £750: about the same as an annual foreign holiday for everyone. So, if we halved military spending, we could all invade a foreign country en masse with buckets and spades instead of Tornadoes and assault rifles, every two years. If there’s one thing guaranteed to give the nation an itching for mindless conquest, it’s taking away their morning coffee . For the price of a hot beverage every workday, we could double military spending and take out Andorra.

. For the price of a hot beverage every workday, we could double military spending and take out Andorra. The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is quite shockingly low. Iraq set us back just £25 a year when it was still going, and Afghanistan is currently costing £70. Admittedly we could, say, double the science budget by bringing Our Boys home from Central Asia, but this money pales into insignificance next to things like benefits, education, the military budget…hang on. Are the costs quoted for badly-planned invasions just for the expense of deploying fleets of aircraft carriers and battalions of ground units, on which a rather more substantial sum has already been spent? The opacity of military book-keeping means we’re not sure.

All alone or all a loan?

The hated Tory student loan plans are only as crippling as the average wedding , when the cost of the average wedding is spread over the average length of a marriage (27 years, if you were wondering). Both come in at around £350 a year. The difference is that having a degree makes you more employable, whereas thankfully we’re no longer in the era where being married does.

plans are only as crippling as the average , when the cost of the average wedding is spread over the average length of a marriage (27 years, if you were wondering). Both come in at around £350 a year. The difference is that having a degree makes you more employable, whereas thankfully we’re no longer in the era where being married does. And speaking of loans, the world’s billion or so richest could pay off African debt for a one-time payment of just £75 each. That doesn’t mean that that’s either politically possible, nor actually desirable—the developmental challenges of the continent are more numerous than its nations, and handing over huge quantities of cash to repay dodgy lenders or fund psychotic militias might not make things better—but it is an indication of the small sums of money with which we could transform the developing world.

Accounting for book-keeping

Beleaguered libraries, poster-child of callous ConDem cuts, cost us a whopping £20 each annually. That’s enough to buy everyone an e-reader at full retail price over five years. Or we could just buy a couple of paperbacks a year. Another possible denominator for this figure would be number of books borrowed: it comes in at around £4 per book. Obviously libraries are more than boxes of books, but given their price it does seem worth thinking outside the box. Or just closing them all down without thinking; why not?

It’s hard to draw a single, smackdown conclusion from what’s basically an executive summary of the entire economy, but we hope some of the above has tickled your preconceptions and prejudices: it certainly did ours. What probably surprised us most is science: that you’re reading this on a computer connected to the Internet when we’ve only been spending such tiny sums on research is properly incredible. What technologies could emerge, or diseases could be cured with just a bit more human effort is obviously impossible to predict—but it definitely seems worth spending a few more quid to find out.

If after all that lot you still have a few questions, why not try the FAQ?