[pharke]

It would be helpful if you could just go to a website, enter in a code from your property tax bill and see exactly how every dollar of the taxes you paid were used. This is one of the valid uses of a public ledger I can think of. In my opinion, all tax funded spending should be traceable like this with each transfer recorded and reported to the tax payer.

[ghaff]

Money is fungible so it doesn't really make sense to ask where your specific dollars went. But in most if not all places in the US you can see the city or town budget and see where money came from and went in general. (It's mostly to schools in the majority of places with the per student expenditure actually often higher in more urban populations.)

[nine_k]

While you cannot trace the money all the way through the economy, you can definitely trace the funds allocation by the articles of the budget, and pro-rate the amounts to the sum of the taxes paid by a person.

It's similar to the way you see amounts that went to taxes, insurance, etc on your payroll.

[pharke]

Technically, there are methods that would allow you to trace money all the way through the economy.

[gruez]

Doesn't checking the city's budget do the same thing? The only thing that site would add is multiply the budget amounts by your tax bill.

[pharke]

I don't feel like that addresses the part of the comment I was speaking to:

> "hey, this is going directly into fixing the roads, and your property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford it, otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most people could be convinced to go along with it.

At a minimum, you could create a system that takes the budget and shows a percent breakdown of where your money goes. If you packaged it nicely so that you could understand it at a glance it would go a long way towards what the comment I was responding to was talking about. After looking at my city's budget, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement. For my municipality at least, it seems to be a mix of specific and extremely nebulous items. I can see that the fire department purchased several new vehicles and even the type of vehicle but the road works department just lists additions to their "fleet" and the sanitation department just lists "new vehicles". I see items for sidewalk and street repairs along with the name of the street but no indication of how much pavement was repaired or what the breakdown of labor vs materials was. I think knowing all of the details would help the public assist their representatives to correct overages and would be a bulwark against corruption. e.g. If I run a business that sells fasteners and I see that the city government is overpaying by 30% for the bolts they use to put up new street signs I could bid on the contract next time around or maybe tip off the newspaper if it's more like 200% over retail.

[notfromhere]

On a property tax bill, it tells you which entity is paid what from the bill. It’s broken down to the entity (city, pensions, schools, parks, cemeteries, libraries). If you want to dig deeper, you can go to the budget for each one of those entities