Public money, public record
“Where does my tax money actually go?”
The answer exists. It is just unreadable.
What that costs right now
- The figures are public, and published in a form almost nobody can open — a Census API, a federal award database, fifty-one different state portals.
- Every state names things differently, so comparing your state to the one next door means normalising two taxonomies by hand.
- By the time a number is usable, the decision it should have informed has already been made.
What this does about it
- Money in and money out for all 51 jurisdictions, side by side, from official sources.
- Ask a question in plain words and get the figure with the source attached.
- Every table exports to a spreadsheet or prints clean.
What it deliberately does not do
Nothing is modelled, estimated or filled in. If a number is missing it stays missing, and where two figures are not strictly comparable the page says so rather than smoothing it over.
For a team, not one person
Newsrooms, county offices, advocacy researchers
- The whole dataset as a licensed JSON feed, refreshed on a schedule
- Your county or state as its own instance, on your own domain
- The figures behind any chart, so a reporter can check them before publishing
- Instead of a records clerk answering the same budget question by hand, over and over.