4 ms·

Not a bad idea. But why does it say "selected items"? I haven't added the numbers up myself, but one of the comments says that the listed things add up to only

• brown9-2 16y ago
  re: "selected items", if you click through to the PDF there is a footnote attached: >4 Budget calculations are based on budget allocations obtained from the Office of Management and Budget using historical tables from the FY2011 budget submission as well as the Congressional Budget Office website for such items as interest on the debt, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. My guess is that the real cause of "selected items" is that the number of things paid for by your taxes are obviously much larger than could fit on a short list, and has a long tail.
  • hugh3 16y ago
    My guess is that the real cause of "selected items" is that the number of things paid for by your taxes are obviously much larger than could fit on a short list, and has a long tail. Well, of course that depends how you slice it. Break it down by department and it looks more like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2010_spending_by_category.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2010_spending_by_categor... The twenty-something listed departments account for 97% of the budget (of course there's other government spending which isn't listed explicitly in the budget, I suppose). This doesn't, of course, include stuff like "Smithsonian Museum", which are included on this list to make people feel warm and fuzzy about paying their taxes.
    • VBprogrammer 16y ago
      If you are ever asked to make a Pie Chart for general distribution please take this as a perfect example of what not to do. This is almost completely unreadable for 6-8% of the male population who suffer from colour-blindness (myself included).
      • wtallis 16y ago
        I don't think that anybody can reliably match all 31 of those colors, particularly when the context changes from similar shades to white. Especially for the big slices, the name needs to be in the slice, not at the side of the chart. The smaller slices can have the names printed in the callout labels along with the percentages.
    • jimbokun 16y ago
      This chart shows that the military, entitlements and interest on the debt account for over 80% of the budget. In other words, the things that are pretty much off limits when politicians discuss the budget.
    • eli 16y ago
      I don't have a citation handy, but there's actually a lot of spending that isn't explicitly in the budget.
    • argv_empty 16y ago
      Interesting that this pie chart shows Social Security's budget as about five percent more than DoD's while the components of military spending listed on the sample receipt total less than half of the Social Security spending.
• Aetius 16y ago
  This is, after all, NPR...no surprise the war was prominent as they have a decidedly progressive news team. I won't call NPR liberal, but certainly left of center, and very critical (as they should be) of the wars.
  • kscaldef 16y ago
    I think the bias in the table actually goes the other way. By breaking down, and omitting parts of, military spending, they make it look relatively minor compared to SS, Medicare, and Medicaid. They have also chosen to display SS intakes, not outflows, which is a $400B difference.
    • hugh3 16y ago
      If you look at the pdf from the think tank which came up with it, you'll see that one of their arguments for doing it this way is that "An educated taxpayer is a progressive's best customer", leaving no doubt what their political agenda is. Somewhat disingenuous from a think tank called the "Third Way", which was originally intended to imply centrism. Still, it's a general law of NPR reporting that a left-wing think tank is called a "think tank" and a right-wing think tank is called a "right-wing think tank".
      • Poiesis 16y ago
        Still, it's a general law of NPR reporting that a left-wing think tank is called a "think tank" and a right-wing think tank is called a "right-wing think tank". I don't really have a dog in this fight, but a quick search suggests you may be mistaken. [site:npr.org "right-wing think tank"] os 8 results; [site:npr.org "think tank"] has about 2380. Nothing funny in robots.txt. But you never know, maybe there aren't that many transcripts on there or something...
        • carbocation 16y ago
          And 4 results for [site:npr.org "left-wing think tank"]
• amalcon 16y ago
  Well, they probably could have done the same job by grouping. If they combined combat operations with military personnel, for example, that would bump it up to third-largest. Leaving out specific items is an obvious way to work an agenda into it, but manipulating the groupings could do the same thing, and more subtly at that. With a little gerrymandering, the receipt could say pretty much anything.
• ssp 16y ago
  The break-down is certainly important. They could choose to lump all military expenses together, or to break down social security into tiny bits. The results would look very different.
  • stuaxo 16y ago
    They need to be grouped and have subtotals. (The items on the left, the subtotals on the right).