Describe your idea:
A website that shows where our taxes are spent, both graphically via charts, and in consumable formats (XML, JSON, etc) for further work/analysis by interested parties .
The graphical views of spending data should be viewable in a variety of ways – by government department, geographical area, via categories such as ‘health’, ‘education’, etc, and should be ‘zoomable’ so that users can focus in on spending within a particular area, etc.
What problem does it solve?:
If done well, the site will be able to supply real numbers in regards to how taxes are spent, and crucially, how these values relate to each other. I expect almost all taxpayers have almost no knowledge as to how much money is spent and where it goes. The site would be a valuable source of information for many groups and would be useful in all sorts of areas.
Type of idea: A brand new project
RSS feed
August 10th, 2009 at 10:40pm
Hmm, but I get send this sort of information in a leaflet by my local council every year.
“How we spend your money” shows how much I paid, how much comes from people like me, and then breaks it down to things like policing and local transport. Some areas people really care about publish their own leaflets breaking it down further (e.g. you can see how Fire Service costs are dominated by the salary and other costs of employing people to fight fires, an unavoidable expense)
It doesn’t seem like MySociety would necessarily be able to deliver anything significantly better.
August 12th, 2009 at 1:22pm
Similar proposals: “Where does it go?” and “OpenSpending”.
August 12th, 2009 at 1:26pm
… and “OurMoney”.
August 13th, 2009 at 6:34pm
Where Does My Money Go is starting to do this http://www.openeconomics.net/wdmmg/ – it’s a good project, please help out!
It needs people interested in particular departments to start the research digging into there spending, and working out the formats and structures for the data overall.
August 28th, 2009 at 1:12pm
Thanks Francis for mentioning Where Does My Money Go. We’re the people building it and we’d love to hear from people who are also interested in this kind of thing.