Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

Have you ever had a huge plate of spaghetti land before you in all it’s glory, looking so delicious that you can’t wait to dive in? You plunge your fork into the glorious, steaming heap of pasta and start spinning your fork to coil the delicious noodles, eager to take a bite, only to … keep spinning… and spinning… and spinning. Trying to find the end of that last darn noodle starts to feel like pulling a handkerchief from a magicians sleeve — it just never ends! As it turns out, that’s a lot like trying to sort out the enacted Federal budgets.

The idea for WhereDoMyTaxesGo.co came from a fun debate with friends over just how much of our personal tax contributions ended up funding various government departments. I was just learning to code at the time, so it seemed like a fun project that would help me learn some technical skills while building a product that might help shed some light into the Federal budget process and help individuals learn how their tax dollars were being spent. At the time it seemed pretty straightforward: Calculate a rough estimate for an individual’s tax burden using the general IRS tax brackets, copy down the proposed federal budget according to it’s clear and straightforward line items by agency, and then do a little math using each agency’s proportion of the total Federal budget to get an individual’s contribution to that agency.

WhereDoMyTaxesGo.co/Explore

We went live with that simple calculator and were overwhelmed with the outpouring of support. Within the week we’d had front-page coverage on ProductHunt and Lifehacker. We’ve had well over 13,000 submissions from curious individuals who wanted to know where their money was going. I knew that I had to keep pushing for more accuracy and more transparency into government budgets. To that end, I started adding state-level budget data. We recently launched State budgets for residents in California, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and Washington which cover nearly 50% of all submissions on the site and provide a much-needed window into state-level finances.

But that wasn’t enough either. It’s not uncommon for federal budgets to take several months to be agreed on, so when we reached January without an agreement it wasn’t a huge surprise. But after the record-breaking government shutdown that hurt so many Americans, I knew that the next step would have to be to show what it was all for and add the actual enacted budget data. People have a right to know what it was all for. So with that mission in mind, I started work on tracking down all the Joint House Resolutions that approved the Federal budget.

Why is Homeland Security getting money allocated in the Agriculture section?

Remember that analogy of a pile of spaghetti that I started with? Well, here’s where it comes back. While the proposed budget is presented in a clear table that shows the amount requested for each agency, the enacted budget is a master of obfuscation designed to ensure that the average person has no idea how much of their money is being spent on which agencies. For instance, in a section titled ‘Agriculture, Rural Development,

Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act’, there is a sum of $1,496,000 allocated for exclusive use of the Office of Homeland Security. Now, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but since when is OHS involved in Agriculture, Rural Development, or the FDA? This is just in the first paragraph of this section, there are 465 more pages to this Gordian knot of a budget. If I were to take a budget that looked like this to my bank and asked for a loan, they’d laugh me out of the place and take away my budget authority.

All of that to say, it’s taking longer than expected to follow the money in this year’s enacted budget and update the calculations for the final enacted budget…

When the proposed Federal budget is presented in a clear and easy to understand table that is readily made accessible to the average person, then why isn’t the enacted budget required by law to be presented in the same format? This is the money of the American citizens, this is your money, you have a right to know how it’s being spent.

If you want to know where your taxes go, then head over to WhereDoMyTaxesGo.co and get a free look behind the curtain on where your money is being spent.

***

Where Do My Taxes Go? was founded in 2018 to provide greater transparency to the U.S. tax system. Users can anonymously enter income data and receive a breakdown of their federal and state taxes to the penny.