Description

This project was somewhat inspired by the recent $2.4-3 trillion dollar addition to the US federal debt, as well as stumbling across an old Obama-era web site showing your taxpayer receipt. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to conceptualize the US federal budget, tax revenues, and debt/deficit as an invoice being sent to each American.

Data sources

There are some surprisingly convenient, free, and unauthenticated (keyless) APIs run by the US government. I am relying on two, one for financial data and one for population data:

• US Department of the Treasury
• US Census Bureau

Methodology

The Treasury Department provides data for both revenues and expenses of the federal government. In order to derive an individualized taxpayer invoice I made the following assumptions:

• The user provides federal income for a given tax year as input.
• I define a “funded ratio” as the proportion of federal expenses that are covered by tax revenue in a given year. This is calculated as total revenue divided by total expenses.
• The user’s share of federal revenue is calculated by dividing their income taxes by the total individual income taxes received in that year. This proportion is then used to scale down expenses. However, since individuals don’t pay debt directly through taxes, I allocate the debt burden on a simple per-capita basis.
• Each expense is divided into 3 categories based on funding sources: 1) income tax, 2) other, non-individual income taxes such as corporate income tax, excise taxes, and customs duties, or 3) debt. To simplify the invoice, I exclude the portion of each expense funded by non-income taxes. Only the portions attributable to individual income taxes and debt are shown. The total of debt and individual income tax is listed under “Amount Due”, the income tax is “Amount Paid”, and the debt is aggregated into the rolling “Balance”.