This is the time of year for small business owners like me to figure out our income for the year to see if we need to buy some office supplies or equipment to offset it. If I was an active farmer, I could buy some more feed or fertilizer.

I found a visual guide to where all our tax dollars go, and even though it sounds kind of boring, I was surprised at how interesting it was.

Follow this link, expand it to full-screen, and then you can zoom in and read the fine print: Death and Taxes Poster.

Here is how the author describes it:


"Death and Taxes" is a large representational graph and poster of the federal budget. It contains over 500 programs and departments and almost every program that receives over 200 million dollars annually. The data is straight from the president's 2012 budget request and will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress to begin the fiscal year. All of the item circles are proportional in size to their funding levels for visual comparison and the percentage change from both 2012 and 2002 is included so you can spot trends.

Ok, so what is it REALLY?

"Death and Taxes" is more than just numbers. It is a uniquely revealing look at our national priorities, that fluctuate yearly, according to the wishes of the President, the power of Congress, and the will of the people. Thousands of pages of raw data have been boiled down to one poster that provides the most open and accessible record of our nations' spending you will ever find. If you pay taxes, then you have paid for a small part of everything in the poster. "Death and Taxes" is an essential poster for any responsible citizen or information junkie.

Down in the lower left corner he shows us the relative size of some interesting indicators: Bill Gates' net worth, worldwide video game market, Hurricane Katrina property damage (it was surprisingly big), Canadian military budget (small), Chinese military budget (big).

Doesn't matter what your opinions are about our current political situation or who you're going to vote for, we all still pay taxes, so it's interesting to see where it goes in a graphical format.