Ever wondered where your taxes went? Who has the time to actually read our $2.8 trillion budget? Well, now there’s an easier way: the incredibly high-res Visual Guide to the Federal Budget. From the site:
Knowledge of how your taxes are spent is essential to being a responsible citizen. If people actually knew what their thousands of dollars of income taxes paid for, there would be rioting in the streets, or at least some more accountability in Congress.
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It’s certainly eye-opening to see where all of the money is being spent. There were some big surprises on that chart for me.
Yes there would be rioting in the streets if people knew what the government was funding. For example, I remember the government granting money to Northwestern University to the tune of $250,000 to study the female response to pornography. Now why should the taxpayers fund this when this strictly benefits media advertisers? If they are funding this with our tax dollers you can only imagine how much other useless pork projects we the taxpayers are paying for.
Holy smokes! That is fantastic.
The key word is “discretionary.” This graph doesn’t show the entire federal government budget.
If you vote for the two mainstream parties you have 2 choices:
Tax and Spend
or
Borrow and Spend
Part of the reason politicans are able to switch between the parties so easily – they really arent that different.
Our elections are the equivalent of pick a color: light blue or teal
I’m a big fan of the Libertarian Party – they are the only party that believes in limited fiscally responsible government and individual freedom. i.e. they offer the choice to run gov’t like a business and to live within our means.
I believe Moderate Libertarians could change this country for the better if a third party ever gets momentum going. The two parties have worked together pretty efficiently to make sure most districts are pre-determined and 3rd parties have a big barrier to entry.
A few constitutional ammendments I’d like to see:
1. Balanced Budget – no deficit unless 2/3 of congress agrees that its needed.
2. Taxation with Representation – the size of the house should grow with the population – so that congress represents people that can hold them accountable. As the population has grown since 1911 every year we’ve lost more and more representation and the money needed to run for office and be able to get your message out has grown. I.E. when you need 1000s of people to vote for you its easy to compete, when it 100s of 1000s you need someone to pay for TV time. The UK (that country we left because of lack of representation) has a house thats almost twice the size of ours for their tiny little islands. This would also make it harder for the parties to “fix” elections since the districts could change much more dramatically every census.
I’d like to see instant runoff voting implemented at the state level so that every candidate elected has recieved at least 50% of the votes approving them.