BUDGETARY WALLPAPER

Taxes are a strange monster. Every time you get paid, a large chunk of what you earn is skimmed off the top and sent to some unseen government account. It happens so matter-of-factly you probably don't even think about it - which is probably for the best. The money is gone before you can feel the sense of loss that would otherwise accompany parting with that much real-world financial value. Those are hours of your life, you know - siphoned away for the privilege in sitting in traffic and taking your shoes off at the airport.

Do you ever wonder how that money is spent? All that money, paycheck after paycheck, for every working American, continually deposited into government accounts to be allocated at the discretion of our elected officials. Have you ever taken the time to investigate exactly how that money is spent? Of course not - who has the time to do that? And what purpose would it serve anyway? Budgetary spending is a clusterfuck of reluctant compromises - no one in America would look at that budget and say, "Yep, that's EXACTLY how I'd do it."

But here's your chance anyhow. It's an in depth poster of how your money is spent. Quite insightful - and well done. You could spend hours clicking around on the different sections surveying the financial landscape for ridiculous expenditures and calamitous inefficiencies. You can even buy the poster so you can put it up at work and groan with agony every morning as it reminds you that your first 2.5 hours will be put toward a mess of shit you could care less about and wouldn't support if you didn't had to.

But that's precisely why we have taxes - so we can fund the interests of everybody at the expense of everybody. Like it or not, that's the way it is. And if you don't like where your money is going, pay attention to who you put in office. The Pentagon war machine, for example, already bloated beyond comprehension, eats more money every time we put a Republican in the head office. And the way they're already starting to drum up "fear" in the early debates, we can only assume they'll be looking to beef up that line item once again should the American people reward their cautionary tales with another term.