Geez! I paid 9,000 five-dollar footlongs in taxes this year. (Harry Sieplinga/HMS Images)

Scott Brown and Bill Nelson, a bipartisan pair of Senators introduced a bill at the beginning of this month that would direct the IRS to issue itemized receipts to taxpayers showing them where their taxes are spent and in what amounts. The bill would also create a website where curious/enraged taxpayers could dig into even deeper detail about exactly where twenty-something percent of their money is going.

There was no word in the article as to how the bill’s expected to do, though it says Nelson is a member of the Senate Finance committee, which will be up first to hear the bill.There is no need to wait with bated breath to learn of the bill’s fate. At least two other non-governmental organizations have already created just such a thing.

This blog post is perhaps the first time Google has ever been referred to as an NGO, but there it is. The company that’s more entrenched in our lives than any other in the world has launched a Data Visualization Challenge using the data from the comprehensive but virtually unnavigable website, WhatWePayFor.com. On the site, one can enter their gross income and filing status and see to the penny what amounts were spent on what programs. The information’s all there, it’s just 134 pages’ worth of clunky, hence the Google challenge.

Much more manageable is the conservative think tank Third Way’s Your Federal Tax Receipt calculator. There’s a lot less to it — defense is all lumped into Defense — but it let’s you get angry a lot quicker. You can see how much bigger the $2,645.28 of your taxes that went toward paying interest on the national debt looks compared to the $29.48 of it that went to arts and culture. You can also see the money that the government’s making and how much of your taxes go to keeping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac alone afloat (it’s ten times what you chipped into for the arts). As a bonus, there’s also the amount of the national debt that belongs to you ($48,382) and how much it increased since the previous year ($5,768).

A PBS post on the Tax Receipt calculator has a great quote from one of Third Way’s members: “This brings [the budget] down to numbers you’re really used to – relative to the cost of a Subway sandwich.”

You have been getting a little tubby lately, dummy.