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Tax Page

Monthly Page
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A Page Telling Us Where The Hell Our Taxes Go
Grittles, Jun 11 2007

US budget poster http://www.thebudgetgraph.com/
[jutta, Jun 11 2007]

US Budget for Fiscal Year 2008 http://www.whitehou.../omb/budget/fy2008/
Disappointingly high-level. What do you have to do to get the *actual* budgets? [jutta, Jun 11 2007]

National Budget Simulation http://www.budgetsim.org/nbs/
[nuclear hobo, Jun 12 2007]

Budget for City of Decatur, Ga. http://decaturga.co.../budget%2006-07.pdf
All the way down to the cost of janitorial supplies for the city manager's office. [Galbinus_Caeli, Jun 12 2007]

[link]






       The general name for the information you're looking for is "budget". So, you'd be looking for the "US budget". (From the way you assume that everybody knows which country you're talking about, I'm guessing you're in the US.)   

       Grittles, this isn't the complaint box for the universe. If you're posting here, you're supposed to have invented something new - not just asking for something. OK?
jutta, Jun 11 2007
  

       No, I agree with this. Something with a lot more transparency than a budget as well as further breakdowns and wastage would be a great idea. Ofcourse this would be like asking politicians to take lie detector tests while they are making campaign promises.
colinwheeler, Jun 11 2007
  

       She meant a messenger, I think.
Voice, Jun 11 2007
  

       Perhaps she was just merely listening...
madness, Jun 11 2007
  

       Can the people who want "transparency" as in I understand it (read: can be set to a 3.51 minute pop song) and the people who want "transparency" as in detail and full accounting (read: thousands and thousands of pages with numbers on them, produced by thousands of people, none of which have read the full document) please get together in some sort of Mad-Maxian cage match, so we only have to deal with whoever emerges a winner? I'd totally pay to see that.
jutta, Jun 11 2007
  

       //telling us where the h our taxes go//   

       And you're going to do what if you don't like the answer? Not pay them?
phundug, Jun 11 2007
  

       Complain to their congressperson? Given that a lot of "grass roots initiatives" and their simulacra try very hard to get normal people to do precisely that, it probably has an effect.
jutta, Jun 11 2007
  

       [Probably Funny To Me And No One Else:] Not paying your taxes might lead to a strong desire to bake cookies/own a bakery, and subsequently to falling in love with the IRS person who comes to audit you, who is hearing a strange voice narrating his life, ultimately ending with his near death by a motor vehicle and salvation by a piece of wristwatch. [/PFTMANOE]
CaptainClapper, Jun 11 2007
  

       [jutta], with the cage-match proposal above I think you have hit on a way of solving not only this, but many other issues in Our Modern World that generate lots of shouting and never any resolution ... I would pay to see it too ... if there was a means of bunning an anno, I would do so.
batou, Jun 11 2007
  

       [jutta], there is an XML dialect (whose name escapes me tonight - do I mean XBRL?), which ought to enable both kinds of transparency in a single source document - you just do a different XSL transformation on it depending on which one you want. Not as much fun to watch as a cage match, though, I grant you.
pertinax, Jun 11 2007
  

       Yes, yes. We will use Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations to add transparency to our political process by formatting it as an interactive outline. (Backs away carefully, nodding and smiling.)   

       Actually, an interactive budget navigator would be amazingly cool, if it were to link, wiki-style, to the actual projects. For example, if a school has been getting money to hire a teacher, visitors could click your way to a photograph of the teacher and maybe a bio. I'd like that. (But I still want the cage match, too.)
jutta, Jun 11 2007
  

       //(Backs away carefully, nodding and smiling.)//   

       <Smiles back, waves, spins cool propellor on hat>
pertinax, Jun 12 2007
  

       No its more like a thing that just notifies you where our taxes are going like our school funding, if we give them millions of dollars and i don't see a single change then where is it going, i would like to know
Grittles, Jun 12 2007
  

       Much of the status quo requires continual funding.
Texticle, Jun 12 2007
  

       We've got auto-boners, they've got auto- veto-ers and auto-no-thank- you-this- will-expose-our- lies-and-corruption-ers.   

       I'm sorry but this democracy (USA) looks like an evil sham spawned from ... the HALF-BAKERY [Da Dummm!]   

       Oh, but a bun for your "positive and forward" thinking.
twitch, Jun 12 2007
  

       Wait, I missed the part where what sounds like a single-line quote from a conservative talk radio show amounts to "thinking". Could you go over that again?   

       What Texticle said.   

       You could find out the answer to your question by asking the people who actually run your school.
jutta, Jun 12 2007
  

       Grittles, all that information is probably available from your local school board. Their proceedings and budget are probably completely public. (Most are.)   

       In my town we get a monthly newsletter about the town, and the city budget is in one issue.   

       Actually a quick look turned it up in the city website. Check out my link.
Galbinus_Caeli, Jun 12 2007
  
      
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