Visualize Where Your Tax Dollars Go

With a quirky weekend reprieve, tax day is today. Want to see where your contribution goes?

The IRS took in $1,175,422,000,000 in individual 2009 taxes, according to their site and the most recent data.

That's a lot of cheddar, to be sure, but where do the feds spread it? Google knows. And now we do, too, in an easy-to-digest visual form.

The Data Viz Challenge was perceived to make the tax data "more accessible to taxpayers," according to Google's blog.

There are calculators for users to visualize everything from how much we work to cover public spending, virtually climbing the towering debt (in the form of a city skyline) and, the LOL Badge winner: "Can I Get a Receipt With That?"

In the end, our jury selected Anil Kandangath’s “Where Did My Tax Dollars Go?” as our Grand Prize winner. As the jury noted, his entry is information-rich but elegantly designed, and at no point while interacting with the visualization do you lose the “big picture.” Anil’s entry is a great example of how data visualization can take boring, complicated, but critically important information and make it accessible to everyone. Congratulations, Anil.