Politics

Getting a Receipt this Year?

By Jake Brewer

Today is tax day.

Sorry to remind you.

Hate ‘em or love ‘em, you almost certainly invested more of your hard earned money into the government last year than you did any other thing in your life. In fact, it’s not unlikely that you spent more on government than you did food, clothing and shelter combined.

And did you get a receipt for it?

We get a receipt for everything these days – printed out, in an email, or even on our phones – but we don’t get one for the single biggest expenditure we have: our taxes.

So where is your money going? How is managed? How is it spent? Good luck finding out everything you’d want to know.

Information about how our taxes are spent should be as accessible to us as information about the weather, sports scores or knowing what?s going on in the stock market. But it’s not.

So let’s tell government what we think. In fact, let’s tell them what we demand. Sign the pledge to make all government data available online and in real-time.

After you’ve signed, be sure to share it with at least 5 other folks you know.

This election year, we’re going to make sure government knows more than ever that openness and transparency is of utmost importance to us when we cast our votes.

Full post as published by Sunlight Foundation on April 15, 2010 (boomark / email).