I have a very specific idea on how to improve democracy. Make all public spending easy to search. Let me elaborate: Via direct and indirect taxes democratic gov

I have a very specific idea on how to improve democracy. Make all public spending easy to search. Let me elaborate: Via direct and indirect taxes democratic governments take and redistribute between 30% and 50% of our income[1]. Yet we usually have no idea how exactly is it the money spent. This has two effects: 1) many disenfranchised people think state spending is somehow secret therefore "all politicians steel" and "the system is evil". This leads to low participation in election, populism etc. 2) even if we try to be good citizens we make uninformed decisions. Specific example from UK: how should we decide whether to keep a fleet of nuclear Trident submarines or axe 30,000 teacher jobs? Is the cost even comparable? During the Brexit campaign someone once posted financial hoax on my FB feed - how much we spend on X. I went to verify the facts only to discover it is absolutely impossible to find how much we spend on anything. After hours of researching all I could find were perplexing .gov websites, unsearchable PDF documents, CSVs too big to open in excel and that obfuscated by impenetrable accounting jargon. Compare it to this: if I ask you what were the earnings of the second movie produced by whoever produced Angelina Jolie's last movie you could probably find the answer on IMDB in less than a minute. And I don't mean only government spending, I mean the whole public sector. States, departments, bureaus, agencies, offices, cities, towns, courts, libraries, schools, hospitals, public benefit corporations. In the end public finance is by definition public and the information should be available to everyone. If you think of it there are only 3 ways a tax dollar could leave public finance: as a salary to employees, as a payment for goods and services from private sector or as a transfer to another organisation or individual. Build a website, get all the data, make it extremely user friendly, easy to search, navigate and share and people will start fact checking each other in FB conversations a participate more in local politics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day#Tax_Freedom_Day_around_the_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day#Tax_Freedom_Da...