April is the cruellest month if for nothing else than paying taxes. In filling out the paperwork, we don't often fill out the one that explains where all of our money is going.
Andrew Johnson and Louis Garcia, two developers from Minneapolis, Minn., created a website called WhatWePayFor.com that uses public data to estimate how our tax money is spent. You enter your income and filing status on the site, and it creates a formatted table of numbers showing your contributions to the federal budget—down to the penny.
Playing around with the site, we found that the median household, which makes $50,233, will pay almost $600 to fund interest payments, about $135 for highways and around $20 for NASA. It also allows you to go back a couple years to see how a similar income would break down. Interesting stuff.
