Where Does Your Tax Go?

Where Does Your Tax Go? is a new app from Public Policy a think tank funded via Atlantic Philanthropies by Irish American Duty-Free billionaire Chuck Feeney

Its a copy of the UK based Where Does My Money Go? - Daily Bread as an effort to tell a human sized story out of government spending estimates by the Open Knowledge Foundation based on OpenSpending data.

I had collected some source of information to copy the UK version while noting the gaps in the data but Public Policy seems to have simplified the calculations compared to the UK version, which showed the effect of indirect taxation on lower incomes. The Effects of Taxes and Benefits
on Household Income, 2010/11 in the UK page 6.

A more detailed blog post explaining it would help, sources for the tax and spending numbers etc.

The UK version used to display the tax categories by size of spend which I somewhat preferred because its hard to take in all the numbers but they split it out into a general bubble tree of UK tax spend

A treemap of the spending might be better

Or comparison over time.

Interesting discussion start by Johnathan Gray on the OKFN mailing list about representing spending numbers. Comparing like with like is best. 1, 2 eg Spending by type - € 1995-2009

Update

They've now written a blog post about Where does your tax go app

Where Do You Fit In?

An earlier app shows where your income lies in relation to everyone else in Ireland. How many are in the bottom 10% of earners and how few earn so much more.

Their third app Can You Hit The Budget Target?.





Update - Tax Transparency
A week later Eoghan Murphy TD introduced Tax Transparency tool, which he explains is a show case for his Tax Transparency Bill he introduced to parliament last year, he emphasises the difference in his is that it is to be used to both calculate the tax, show you what taxes you pay and what slice of them is used in government spending.
He was helped make this by Karl Monaghan who also made Taxcalc.ie tax calculator tool.