[canada_dry]

I've often thought that municipal or even state governments should make available an interactive budget tool for constituents using this kind of visualization.

The purpose would be to show that everything the gov't does is connected through incoming taxes and outgoing expenditures - and there are very tough choices when it comes to the direction of taxes.

[op03]

Google Sankey diagrams Budgets. There are lots of tools - eg - https://github.com/ricklupton/floweaver, sankeymatic.com etc

Not my area but complications in visualizing flows dramatically increase when the flows criss cross. Even small budgets start looking like chaotic weaving.

Which I think is why we still have buildings full of accountants and analysts to make sense of what is going on even though lots of people have access to the data.

[stared]

There is a game about that Democracy 3 (https://www.positech.co.uk/democracy3/).

I think it should be a mandatory exercise for any politician - and voter.

[memexy]

This is a good idea. Why do you suppose they don't do it?

[LyndsySimon]

Based on my own experience at local government meetings, I don’t think the knowledge is all in one place.

The meeting I’m thinking of was the city council advocating extending a tax that was due to expire. They had a presentation deck full of the things they planned to use the money for. That’s all well and good, but when I raised my hand and asked what proportion of incoming revenue for the public works department and the overall city budget the tax currently made up... crickets.

No one there knew exactly how much public works was allocated, because the director of public works. They had the overall city budget numbers handy, but no one there had a breakdown by source, and no one knew where to find that information.

[memexy]

I see. So they didn't even have the tools to gather the data in the first place it sounds like, let alone figure out how to put together a simulation for it.

[rapsey]

It's not so simple. Governments run huge deficits and debt is the primary means of funding. Taxes are more of an inflation guard.

[Sambdala]

They specified Municipal and/or State governments which cannot monetize a deficit.