If ignorance is bliss, then look away. Crafty data wizards have sculpted publicly accessible federal budget data into interactive visualizations, giving you — the tax payer — visual representations of your annual contributions.
In late February, Google, in partnership with non-profit art and technology center Eyebeam, started the Data Viz Challenge — a call to information architects, designers and developers to tap the WhatWePayFor.com API and create visualizations for how tax payers’ contributions are spent.
After receiving more than 40 submissions, Google has whittled down the competition to six finalists. A committee will select a single winner who will be awarded a $5,000 cash prize.
Each of the finalists, whose work can be seen below, has created a project that shows tax payers how their federal tax dollars are allocated in various machinations. The visualizations, which hinge around salaries, filing status and other data points, are quite illuminating — or horrifying, depending on how you feel about Uncle Sam’s take of your wages.
Take a look at the finalists, interact with the visualizations, rate your favorites and look for Google and Eyebeam to announce the winner on everyone’s favorite day: Tax Day, April 18.
Budget Climb
Budget Climb gives users an interactive data environment for 26 years of federal spending.
Developed by NYU students Zach Schwartz, Fred Truman and Frankie Cheung, Budget Climb displays budget data as a cityscape that the user can physically explore using Kinect.
What Do You Work For?
In this visualization, creator Jeffrey Baumes answers the question, “Where would your money go if you paid your federal taxes with your entire income starting January first?”
Here’s a hint: If you file as a single worker and claim $50,000 in annual income, in the 13 working days from January 20 to February 7, your entire income would go toward Social Security. That’s $2,507.52, or 5% of your annual salary.
Visualize Your Taxes
Mark Won, Salil Jain and Carl Ng have created a visualization that pits your tax spending priorities against budget realities.
You tell the app how you’d like your tax dollars to be spent by ranking priorities, and Visualize Your Taxes will show you if your preferences align with how the government spends your contributions and how this has changed over time.
Where Did My Tax Dollars Go
Where did my tax dollars go? It’s a fair question that this web app seeks to answer with interactive charts.
Enter your income and filing status, and the app returns federal, social security and medicare tax contributions for 2009. A pie chart then visualizes how your money was spent, and you can click on each piece for a full departmental breakdown on where your dollars went.
Every Day Is Tax Day
With a name that gives us the warm-and-fuzzies (not really), Every Day is Tax Day, from creator Fred Chasen, reminds us that we are working for the government every day.
Chasen’s visualization shows you how your time is spent by government department.
An individual making $50,000 in 2010, for example, is working four minutes each workday for the Department of Agriculture. How noble of us all.
Taxmapper
Hermann Zschiegner and John Halloran have created TaxMapper, an interactive slideshow for visualizing — by budget category — government tax dollar spending over the years.
More About: eyebeam, Google, tax data, taxes
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