Why does public spending seem to keep rising rapidly, no matter whom we elect?
Perhaps it is not so much the party of those we send to Congress or to our state legislature that counts. Perhaps what matters more is that so many of the decisions about how your money is spent are made in the dark.
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Setting a budget is complicated. The data might exist. Some of it might even be public. But it sits squirreled away on a spreadsheet somewhere — and you would need a CPA to make sense of it. Frankly, most folk do not have the time.
But what if technology could suddenly take all that data and build something that makes it easy to see? Easy to see who gets your tax dollars, and what they do with them once they have them.
This is not a problem peculiar to one state. It is the condition of government almost everywhere in America. We are taxed by authorities we cannot scrutinize, to fund programs we cannot see, run by people who would rather we did not ask.
That is what we set out to change at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, with a tool we built called TaxToolMS.com. It is, as far as we know, the first of its kind in the country. And there is no reason something like it could not exist in all fifty states.
Here is how it works. Type in a few details, and up pops your tax bill — what you pay to your local government, to your state capital, and to Washington, itemized by the agencies and departments that spend it. How much goes to your local schools? To the department of corrections? To the ever-expanding category politicians like to call “economic development”? You can see all of it, line by line. It is free, there is no login, and nothing you type ever leaves your own screen.
But the calculator is only half of it. Alongside it we built a search box for public money — a kind of state-level DOGE. Type in a name, and you can comb through the tens of thousands of vendors, contractors, and recipients who take in taxpayer dollars, and see which of them have quietly enjoyed the largest increases.
Consider what a tool like that might have caught elsewhere. In Minnesota, a scheme known as “Feeding Our Future” siphoned roughly a quarter of a billion dollars in federal funds through charities that were barely feeding anyone. Had ordinary citizens been able to watch that money move in something close to real time, would it really have taken so long for someone to ask the obvious questions?
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Run a search and you can also see how many millions of dollars government spends on lobbyists — to lobby government. Splendid news for the lobbyists. Rather less so for families struggling with rising prices. The whole arrangement is absurd, and it persists largely because so few people can see it.
The scale of what is hidden is hard to overstate. In our state, the legislature openly debates a budget of around $7 billion a year, while more than three times that flows through state agencies annually, almost entirely beyond public view. Multiply that across the country, and you begin to grasp how much public money moves every year with virtually no one watching.
We did not build this to manufacture outrage. We built it to give citizens information that has, for all practical purposes, been the private preserve of the political class. Every figure comes from official data. It cannot know your full circumstances, so it is only ever an estimate.
Sunlight, as the old line has it, is the best disinfectant. Perhaps the surest way — maybe the only way — to stop public spending from rising ruinously, in any state and at every level, is to let the people who pay for it finally see where it goes.
So, find out. It is your money. You ought to know where it goes, and who gets it.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
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