Show HN: How Obama's budget proposal affects you (Weekend Hack) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: How Obama's budget proposal affects you (Weekend Hack)

howmuchmorewillmytaxesbe.com

49 pointssnikolic37 comments

My concern here is that, although you are relating simple facts, you are also making a political statement. To see what I mean, let's say I wrote an app "See how many dollars of debt your elected representative approved" Even though it may all be based on publicly-available data, there would instantly be a conversation around "was this a vote for debt or was the expense offset" and "was it a one-time vote or was it an entitlement" or "Did he vote against it before he voted for it" and so on. That's because you can take the same data and present it in vastly different contexts. Heck, that's what politics is all about. I know you mean well and are not trying to spin me. It's just that "how Obama's budget will affect you" can be done a lot of different ways, all with different impacts on the user.

There's also an issue of timeliness -- things are moving faster on the ground, and all of your hard work could be for nothing just in a few day's time.

Happy to upvote you, though! Hope you got some good experience from it. But I also hope this doesn't start a trend of quick hacks that are really more political commentary than useful. Heck, I already knew that the rates would change and that "millionaires and billionaires" now officially starts at 200K per year.

Thanks for the upvote!

I agree with you. There's a bit of bias in all of this, and no matter how objective I try to be (or don't), I'm inherently making a political statement. Most political issues are way too complex to summarize with a website that spits out a binary answer in a giant font. It's dangerous to even try.

On the other hand, I think it's a travesty that our system is so opaque to its own constituents. I'm upset at how difficult it was for me to find a simple datapoint about a widely discussed and hot political issue - namely, what happens to my taxes? I'm still not 100% sure I've got the datapoint correct, either.

This is tricky: We lack information. Information isn't digestible by most folks unless it's in easily consumable soundbites and datapoints. But incomplete information, or information without context, might be just as dangerous as no information at all. So where do we start?

I have no idea, but it's been fun seeing some strangers tweet my site around.

People using facts and only true statements would be a refreshing change in politics or even journalism. Let them have the bias they want as long as they check their facts.

I was wading through opaque news and wikipedia articles to figure out how Obama's budget proposal would affect me, and I decided to make a Saturday afternoon public service project out of my findings. A nice change of pace from working on http://flock.fm. :-)

Any feedback (UI, technical, tax code clarification, etc.) would be appreciated, although this was a rushed little project.

Disclaimer: This is my best interpretation of tax code...my numbers could be wrong!

Looks cool, especially for a weekend hack. The design is very well done.

Thank you!

You should support commas, decimals, and dollar signs in the taxable income allowed. Keeping statistics for how many people using the tool would actually be affected might also be a useful exercise.

Agreed. Though my income of 224,000 was a bit of a stretch :-)

Thanks for the feedback!

I'm updating the site right now to strip dollar signs out of the input. Commas and periods are a bit trickier, and something I hesitated about for a long time. Given that I was trying to get this done in just a few hours, I got lazy and decided to simply throw an alert message if someone uses punctuation. I'm about to update the alert message to make it a bit clearer, since this might be a more common issue than I anticipated.

To keep development fast/simple, I decided against any backend recording of people's data. However, Google Analytics will probably be able to give some high-level statistics...I'll be sure to share the info if it's interesting!

Data about the inputs will be worthless. I went once saying that I did not make more than $200k last year, and then got curious and did it again, several more times with different numbers. I can't say everyone will be as curious as I was about the numbers, but I would imagine that several people will want to see what someone who made $1,000,000 would have to pay extra in taxes.

You're totally right.

Cool. But I can't use the website on a laptop with a 1366x768 screen: the buttons aren't visible. I can't scroll to them. (If I push F11 I can see them.)

Updated the site with a few tweaks...better?

Still doesn't work for my netbook since your tweak. 8.9inch screen - 1024 x 600 - doubt many use a laptop this small!

Cheers, nice site, great idea.

I lied...I didn't actually fix the problem, because I didn't upload the correct version of the file, because I'm not using proper version control. Color me embarrassed.

Is it better now?

Perfect, thanks ;)

call me a libertarian but a budget that refuses to address the serious issues that drive spending (entitlements, defense etc) might not affect my direct tax liability, but it still supports a system that devalues the money the government does not take from me every 2 weeks.

Problem isn't what gov spends its money on, but how it spends its money: http://infovegan.com/2010/11/02/how-vs-what

Nice site. I had to step back about 3 feet from my monitor just so I could read the damn thing, though. Larger doesn't always = easier to read.

Just shrunk the fonts slightly.

I like it. Small nitpick: back button doesn't work. Might try implementing the pushState API or use a hack.

another nitpick, use the 'label' tag and the 'for' attribute with your yes/no radio buttons to make them easier to select.

Fair nitpick. :-)

I'll update the page in a few minutes with these fixes.

Thanks!

I spent 10 minutes this morning staring into space, anticipating that someone on HN would complain about the broken back button, and wondering if I should add support before posting the link on HN. I got lazy and decided to just ship the thing. :-)

Fair nitpick, and nice to know that broken back buttons bother someone else as much as they bother me. Don't think I'll be fixing them anytime soon, though.

If it's possible, I think it would be interesting for the purposes of discussion to also include the amount you are currently paying in taxes, in order to calculate your net tax amount. In other words, show what your take home pay would be under the new plan.

Hey aren't they talking about raising the cap on Social Security and Medicare taxes too?

Yeah, it's way more complicated than this. SS, Medicare, payroll taxes, estate taxes, etc. are all part of the proposal. I just wanted to focus on income tax for this project - I think your average joe can most easily understand income taxes (and probably complains about them most often).

Also, because there are only so many hours of my life I'm willing to spend deciphering tax law.

Minor usability critique: It wasn't clear from the wording whether you meant personal income or family income at the first question. It appears that you meant family taxable income.

I like the use of "We" and "our" in the disclaimer--a nice touch that makes you sound a lot bigger than one person

(Currently under the impression that its just Snikolic who made this)

Actually, it's the other way around. I've been been falsely answering all of the posts here on HN in the first person. The site was really built by a "we".

Robert (not an HN member, sadly) is a designer, and my co-founder at http://www.flock.fm. We were bored of working on Flock on Saturday, started talking politics, and took a few hours to whip this up together.

A member now, apparently! Thought it was worth chiming in. I think it's safe to say that the site has a bias - but we're not claiming otherwise. This is as much activism as journalism - though I believe the facts we present are correct. Personally, I'm biased in favor of education and discourse - and I'm pleased that some has been generated by my and snikolic's efforts.

Great site. The complaints of political bias are just silly. You're putting numbers into an accessible form. If people find political bias in running numbers, that's their problem. As for the "relieved?" everyone in every camp is currently anxious about taxation and the budget, so it's quite reasonable.

    Obama's budget proposal won't increase your income tax liability.
    Relieved? Tell your friends to keep calm and carry on.

This is quite insulting to supporters of individual freedom, as if all we care about is not to get taxed.

What if I did a similar website asking:

    Did you murder someone in the past year? 
    No? 
    Obama's proposal to sentence all murderers to death won't affect you. 
    Relieved? Tell your friends to keep calm and carry on.

I see your point, and I'll admit I was a little uneasy about throwing that line in...it can certainly be interpreted as a bias. My designer and I were just looking for a witty and ever-so-slightly incendiary phrase to use as a call to action. I apologize...guess it's a bit more incendiary than we planned.

On the other hand: 1) I think your analogy is flawed, and kind of extreme. 2) Hypothetical tax policy proposed by a democratically elected representative is most certainly not an attack on personal freedom. (Taxes levied by a despot would be.) 3) The "Tell your friends to keep calm and carry on" phrase is a direct response to the rhetorical "Relieved?". It's merely a call to action for those who are relieved by Obama's budget proposal and its direct effects on their tax liabilities.

Totally agree that you can throw whatever political commentary you want on this site; it's your project to have fun with, and you don't need to apologize. But as long as we're going off-topic and into politics...

>tax policy proposed by a democratically elected representative is most certainly not an attack on personal freedom.

Couldn't disagree more! It's better than a despot, but tyranny by the majority can definitely be an attack on personal freedom. If the white-majority-held congress voted to take all the property of some racial minority and divide it amongst white people, the fact that it was democratic wouldn't make it right!

And to be more provocative: reasonable people can disagree on whether the same is true if you replace "white" with "middle class" and "racial minority" with "rich". It's all going to depend on your personal moral/political philosophy.

Thanks for the support!

I agree; you're right that tyranny by majority is an attack on personal freedom...but that's a structural failing of our democracy. I think it's a bit unfair to connect systemic faults of a society and government to a specific budget proposal.

Seeing that you've been here for over a year, I doubt you are a troll. That being said, you're not supposed to flag submissions you disagree with.

See: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for more information.

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