A Brilliant Map of Where Your Tax Money Is Headed
On the day you say your final goodbyes to the government's share of your income, console yourself by checking out exactly where each dollar is going. A Google sponsored interactive visualization gives an incredibly detailed accounting.
The website WhereDidMyTaxDollarsGo.com is the winning entry in a contest Google sponsored to visualize the federal budget. Punch in your income and filing status, and you'll get a dollar breakdown of what you likely paid in federal, social security and medicare taxes and a pie chart of how many dollars went to each category of federal spending.
The best part, though, is that if you click a slice of the pie, you get an additional pie chart breaking down spending in the category further. So you can tell how much within the defense budget went to, say, Navy personell versus air force maintenance. And if you start to feel overwhelmed by budget details, you can always see the budget as one long receipt at runner up entry CanIHaveAReceiptWithThat.com.
