The Giving America Series · Proposal Nº 5
Tax Report Cards
see where your money goes
Almost nobody knows where their taxes go. A tax report card would show you. In this interactive, set what your household earns, and see what a tax report card could look like, at every level of government. Then, see what it would feel like to tell the government how you think it should spend your money.
Figure one
Your report card
One year of your taxes, line by line.
US median household income is around $80,000. Each level uses an estimated effective rate — the federal one includes the employee share of payroll tax, because Social Security and Medicare are the two largest lines on the card.
Now, you respond
A report card that only reports is half an idea. The other half is that you get to mark it — to say what you would have done instead, and to have somebody count it.
You have exactly 100% to spend. Move anything you like — but the running total has to come back to 100 before you can submit. In the real world, your suggestions would be aggregated with the rest of your community into a community average, which would be shared with legislators (and the public), giving you a real voice in how your taxes are spent.
Figure two
Your answer
Move anything you like — you just have to end up back at 100%.
In the real world, a legislature would not be bound by this — but it might have to publish its grade. This creates the best of both worlds — the government would be truly, visibly accountable to the people's voice in its spending, while maintaining its ability to do its job in the way it sees fit.
FARE score — Tax Report Cards
8 / 20Your taxes are still taken, in the same amount, on the same schedule. The one free act here is optional and comes at the end: nobody has to fill in the preference form.
Receiving the report card is passive — it arrives whether you wanted it or not. What's active is the response. And because it's zero-sum, you have to take the time to put yourself in the government's shoes and think about what you really want: to raise education you have to say what you're cutting.
The IRS is currently the poster child of faceless bureaucracy; if our current interactions with it are a 0 on relational, this brings it up to a 2. Governments can show off their work, including sharing personal interest stories about what our tax dollars accomplished. And most importantly, we can respond back by telling them how we think they should allocate our money next time.
Visibility is a precondition for accountability, not accountability itself. The preferences and the letter grade make a real feedback loop, but legislatures are not required to respond to both. The report cards clear up misconceptions reliably; but they change spending only insofar as informed people use them to apply pressure.
The cheapest proposal in the series so far and the most infrastructural: it raises no money and spends none, it just makes everything else legible. It barely moves Free, but it takes the taxpayer's Relational up from roughly zero, which is no small feat.
Roadmap assumptions
These two change nothing on this page. They set how far and how fast this proposal is assumed to spread when it appears on the roadmap alongside the rest of the series.
A disclosure mandate saturates rather than compounding: it is finished once everyone does it.
Method notes
The shares are real; the fit is not a trace. Federal figures are the US Treasury Combined Statement for FY2025, state figures are NASBO's State Expenditure Report for FY2024, and local figures are Census/Urban Institute local direct general expenditure for FY2021. Each level publishes on its own schedule, which is why the vintages differ. Following the fine print on the UK's own summary, this is aggregate spending fitted onto your total — not an attempt to trace your particular dollars through the system, which would be less useful even if it were possible.
Two federal functions are left out. Undistributed Offsetting Receipts and Commerce and Housing Credit were both negative in FY2025 — they are receipts netted against outlays — and a report card cannot show someone a negative slice of their own contribution without misleading them. The remaining functions are normalised to 100%.
Federal education looks impossibly small. It is 1% of FY2025 outlays because of a student-loan accounting revision, not a policy cut of that size; the card says so in place.
The city here is nobody's city in particular. It stands for a deliberately unnamed American city of 180,000 — the same one the participatory budgeting page uses — with a budget derived from national per-capita averages rather than any single city's book. "Local" means what a property tax bill actually funds: city, county and school district together, which is also how this proposal would be delivered.
The grade is the ordinary school scale. Your score is the share of spending you would have left where it is — 100 minus how much of the budget you would move — and 90/80/70/60 does the rest. An earlier version graded the distance directly and was punishing: because raising one category forces you to lower another, a single honest edit already scored a C and any real set of preferences failed, which tells a reader nothing.
Nothing is submitted anywhere. The submit button stamps your card and stops. There is no endpoint, no aggregate and no list — collecting answers is what the proposal asks governments to do, not something this page quietly does on their behalf. The stamp says so too, because a satisfying button that implied otherwise would be worse than no button.