Where your taxes go
May 19th, 2011 at 3:50 pm by David FarrarMark Hansen has put together a nice wee site called “Where are my taxes“. Click on a pie graph to bring up a vote, and it then also gives you the breakdown per capita of spending in that vote. Did you know we spend $4 per person on weather forecasting?
Mark blogs about his site here. It’s a great wee resource.
UPDATE: Also check out a really cool visulation by Keith Ng at Public Address. It shows trends and all.
Tags: Budget, Mark Hansen
May 19th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
..and $5 a head giving over 65s “free” bus fares. Lunacy.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
And how much did those over 65′s pay so you could go to school Greg?
You Logans Run types scare the crap out of me. Did your parents beat you or something?
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 3:58 pm
4.7B for the Treasury doesn’t look like value for money (unless they get the budgets growth predictions right this time of course).
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:03 pm
@ Murray pointless argument – I pay more to support a single national supernuitant for a year than a year’s education cost. Spare me the greatest generation crap.
Actually my mum did, never when I didnt deserve it and didnt seem to do lasting harm.
Subsidising consumption is almost always really poor policy. This particular bribe to Peters is worse than most.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:04 pm
@ Johnboy pretty sure that includes interest and DMO cost, the policy advice component is way less.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:04 pm
I want my $10.19 back for ‘Policy Advice – finance’ from the Treasury.. a monkey with an etch-a-sketch would do a better job at predicting this country’s economic growth..
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:05 pm
What is the per capita:
$3.68 New Zealand House, London
And why is it under Treasury rather than Foreign Affairs? Surely we don’t spend $120million a year running the High Commission in London?
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:06 pm
She should have used a bigger stick Greg. Remind me to have you turned off at 65 when we’re done with you too.
What I get from the graph is that social welfare were to turn off their lights at night and not have bikkies for morning tea they could fund their own entire defence force. Theres some freaken perspective.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:07 pm
The ‘devil’ is in the ‘detail’.
The information we are NOT given, across all state sectors is:
1) How much taxpayer monies are being spent on the ‘contractocracy’ as opposed to the ‘bureaucracy’?
Across all state sectors, where is the publicly-available information which gives the following ‘devilish detail’?
a) The name of the contractor/consultant/company.
b) The scope, term, and value of the contract.
c) Who signed off the contract?
2) Where is the ‘Register of Interests’ for ALL staff (‘in-house’ / contracted) responsible for property and procurement?
Who is checking for potential ‘conflicts of interests’ between those who give out the contracts and those who receive the contracts?
How can you check for ‘conflicts of interest’ when the interests are not ‘declared’?
How much public monies could be saved by applying the scalpel to all the private ‘piggy-in-the-middle’ consultant and contractor ‘blubber’?
Penny Bright
Vote:http://waterpressure.wordpress.com
May 19th, 2011 at 4:10 pm
Quick look at this pretty site over here, whatever you do don’t look at the budget. Obviously nothing to see there …
[DPF: Don't be an idiot. I have done two other posts on the budget. When someone e-mails me a cool site using data visualisation, I will often blgo it.
It amuses me how paranoid and suspicious you are. Because I know you are always reflecting your own inner demons]
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:10 pm
“Surely we don’t spend $120million a year running the High Commission in London?”
We used to when Jonathan Hunt held the keys to the wine cellar there.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Far out.
We spend more on the DPB than the police.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
Quick look at this pretty site over here, whatever you do don’t look at the budget. Obviously nothing to see there
Then why has he done three posts on it so far?
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:28 pm
$1b for the Department of Building & Housing! That can’t be right, can it? I have a fair idea of what it does, and it ain’t worth $1,000,000,000. That chart demonstrates just how easy it could be to redress the deficit.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:35 pm
$4 per head on weather forecasting. Yet another private good taken over by the public service. Sigh.
$1 billion on building houses. How the FUCK is that possible? Why on earth does government need to be building houses? It is one thing to subsidise access to the poor and needy. It is another to hire the builders, buy the materials, and go and build the things, when there is a large, well functioning private industry there ready and waiting to do the work. God damn that is ridiculous. The government is simply replacing private decisionmaking with bureaucracy. I would bet everything that the cost per square metre of a government buikding, controlling for quality, is more than the private sector. That just makes NZ poorer.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:39 pm
ben, that’s the problem, the BDH doesn’t build houses at all. It oversees the building industry, and that’s about it.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 4:48 pm
Then let me say again: how is that possible? What exactly is that $1 billion buying? Could this fucking country be more poorly led?
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 5:20 pm
‘Logan’s Run’ Murray? Showing your vintage there mate…
I for one am perfectly happy to give a few hard-earned tax dollars to help the over 65s…It’s ‘Baby farm’ DPB recipients and lazy life-long beneficiaries/ criminals that can starve on the street as far as I’m concerned. The economy simply cannot sustain such a massive portion of people who CHOOSE not to contribute to society.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 5:28 pm
$4.7 billion for treasury?. Thought they could print their own.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 5:42 pm
$1.0 billion for the Building Industry would like a detailed breakdown of the $1.0 billion especially after the leaky homes fiasco.
I certainly hope none of the people are still there who changed the Building Codes in an effort to get cheaper housing.
No wonder no new homes are being built in this country with the cost of land and extremely high building costs, good job the Government sold most of our State Forests to the USA and the Chinese.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 5:48 pm
The really bloody amazing thing here is that Bill could only find $1B to save (over three years).
Most of that is from re-shuffling how the tossers book keep the Kiwisaver deductions so is basically sleight of hand.
Sacking half the time serving fuckers would have saved a lot more much more quickly.
And they slash the paltry contribution to the real workers savings by reducing the so called tax credit for Kiwisaver.
Real Governments give tax breaks to encourage savings guess thats why we are doomed to be a banana republic forever
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 6:00 pm
Agree with you Johnboy Its time we stopped paying the lazy unproductive to spit out more future lazy unproductives.
Time to take the slasher to Vote Social Welfare. Dont want to contribute to society in a positive manner.
Then tough shit no money sunshine.
Some of us are going to turn the tap off.
We dont have ATM tattooed on our foreheads as this and every other Gumint for the past 40 years has assumed.
Forget benny bashing. its time for a Revolution
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 6:25 pm
…
…
You guys know you can click on the departments/ministries to see a breakdown of their budget, right? Like it says in big letters in the middle of the page?
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Work (sorry time serve) for them do you simonway?
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 6:33 pm
Department of Building & Housing spends 1Bn…. and it mostly looks like welfare.
welfare creates dependance.
time for welfare reform.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 6:35 pm
Still no one can put up a graph to show how the fucking councils can blow our rates money the way that they do.
Down my way we have the wanker traffic engineers building a bloody roundabout at the Coast Rd./Hine Rd./ Burdan Ave. intersection for absolutely no bloody reason at all other than the fact that they obviously need to justify their bloody existence.
There has never been a damned hold up there to my knowledge and if accidents have happened it is entirely due to the stupidity and lack of bloody skill of the drivers involved.
Perhaps some wanker from the HCC could enlighten me as to why they are wasting our cash?
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 6:45 pm
Thats nothing. You want to calcuate how much road space Councils are turning into cycleways.
Sandblasting off the old road markings, painting on ‘pretty’, new cylceway markings.
Now we have to sweep them as well.
Talk about waste of money.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 6:50 pm
Not if you own a paint manufacturing/application company Caleb.
I really like the little bicycle stencils and the green paint all over the road.
Wonder what it all costs?
Not that I’m nosy it’s just that seeing that I am bloody paying for it I would like to know.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 7:09 pm
I thought road paint was much more slippery in the wet esp on a bike. Hoperfully some bright young bureaucrat has included the additional ACC costs in tonight’s budget. I wonder why they decided to do it that way?
Let’s hope when ACC finds out about it they won’t make JK’s flag-ship policy sand-blast it all off again, for safety reasons.
Oh dear.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 7:44 pm
Check out the TPK vote.
You guys will be please so see that you just spent $1.68 each on “whakamana”
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 8:05 pm
That seems quite cheap (even though I don’t recollect spending) it hayek. Must have been pissed at the time.
So I have Whakaed a Mana eh.
Here was me thinking I was straight.
The wife always told me I made a bloody fool of myself when I was pissed.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 8:20 pm
You could have had a 40g pack of kettle chips for that!
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 9:15 pm
So much to run the IRD? Must be some efficency gains to made there.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 9:47 pm
That is a very impressive site.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 10:03 pm
WHat is “Allocation of New Zealand Units” that the Environment Ministry speds 0.91 billion on?
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 10:14 pm
@Put it away: I believe that is something today with emissions trading. The govt incurred a substantial loss in the carbon trading money-go-round subsidising various industries and pressure groups.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 11:08 pm
Sorry, I still cannot get over $1,000,000,000 (a thousand million dollars) on an outfit that promulgates building regulations, ie, tells builders where to bang nails in.
Vote:May 19th, 2011 at 11:12 pm
@Rich Prick: Click on the breakdown. Its mainly the Housing New Zealand rent subsidies.
Vote:May 20th, 2011 at 12:59 am
Its mainly the Housing New Zealand rent subsidies
Thanks hayek, but still, a thousand million on fuckers too useless to rent to their own means? Come on! A billion bucks to house a fuckwits too lazy to sort their own shit out. After Housing NZ, Wellington City Council and Christchurch City Council are the biggest landlords in NZ, so we pay as taxpayers and as ratepayer, fucking awesome. Boot the useless no-hopers out and sell it all. And stick the mentals in containers, they won’t notice.
Vote:May 20th, 2011 at 1:09 am
Actually hayek, just checked, and its not the DBH that is responsible for social housing, that’s social welfare and silly Councils that feel the uruge to burden their ratepayers, so, my question does stand, what the fuck does $1b buy from the Department of Buiding and Housing? Considerring what the Defence Force for a lot less, apparently.
Vote:May 20th, 2011 at 8:14 am
Yeah Murray suggesting spending tax dollars on day trips to Kawau for seniors is a bad idea is EXACTLY the same as suggesting they all be euthanised (at 30 no less if I take your Logan’s Run suggestion).
I hope in 17 years when I am 65 that there is no national super, that no state pensions are available to people under at least 70, that it is all so means tested that people like me will never get them and that it is de-linked from the average wage. But I’m not in the least optimistic.
Vote:May 20th, 2011 at 8:31 am
Defence gets more than Environment. That’s pretty messed up.
Vote:May 20th, 2011 at 8:44 am
@Rich Prick: The breakdown for DBH says:
*$590mill Purchase of Housing and Related Services for Tenants Paying Income Related Rent
*$180mill Refinancing of Housing New Zealand Corporation and Housing New Zealand Limited Debt
*$40mill Wellington City Council Social Housing Assistance
*$20mill Acquisition and Development of properties under the Housing Act 1955
*$20mill HNZC Housing Support Services
*$9mill Acquisition and Improvement of Housing New Zealand Corporation state houses
etc etc (a few smaller budget lines after that)
Correct that there is also, in MSD budget:
$1.26billion Accommodation Assistance
Vote:May 20th, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Funny how Coke is cheaper than milk, but good government is cheaper than bad government.
Vote: