Tag Archives: public debt

October 12, 2010 · 8:00 pm

My 2009 tax receipt

Some days ago, my friend Bruno tweeted a very interesting article about a proposal by the American think tank Third Way to enclose a kind of tax receipt detailing the taxpayer the use the administration had given to her funds (see the original receipt in the previous link).

Therefore, this post is not an original idea but the application of that proposal to the case of Spain and me as the taxpayer.

To build the “tax receipt” I used 2009 figures. The source I used for a detailed breakdown of Spain’s budget is the same one than a I used in a previous post: a good infographic from lainformacion.com.

 

My 2009 income tax and social security receipt.

 

Some curiosities:

  • I (and you too) paid more than double for unemployment subsidies (504 €) than to foster employment (195 €),
  • I spent 440 € to pay off public debt,
  • I paid 119 € for health… I consider that cheap; in 2009 I actually went to the doctor couple of times and got some vaccines partially subsidized.
  • I paid 201 € in defence and 37 € in defence-related R&D… taking into account that my salary partially comes from there, I wouldn’t mind more of it to be spent there.

One final remark: the government when decreased functionaries salaries in spring was looking with those measures to cut ~15.000 million € in about 1.5 years… this would mean about 220 € per inhabitant / year… where would you take those 220 € from my 2009 bill?

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May 11, 2010 · 8:00 am

Budgets and Gadgets

A couple of Sundays ago I was discussing with my father about Spanish public debt, budget deficits, etc. We both had some figures in mind and I also had some others recorded in the mobile phone, from a conference I had attended at EOI Business School some months before (see the slides below).

Over the table, my father and I were trying to figure out whether the Spanish public debt could reach or not 75% of GDP in two years from now: “given that budget is around 35% of GDP and public debt is around 53% of GDP, then if budget deficit is 12% this would add to the public debt no more than 4% debt over GDP a year”… at that moment I missed having had at hand a detailed view of the Spanish Government Budget of 2010. I wanted to have some TreeMap of the budget like the one I had recently seen from the US 2011 Budget request at The New York Times website.

So I put myself into it. Google docs spreadsheet has among its many gadgets the possibility to draw a Tree Map which is precisely what I wanted to have. First I used some already prepared data from the my job to see how it worked, and, once I saw it was easy, I gathered the data about Spanish Government from the following website (of which I also liked much the way of presenting).

I had seen some treemaps before at the job, but so far not so many outside. So, the main purpose of this post is not to talk about budgets, but to let you know about this gadget which maybe useful in your job. You may see below the gadget I prepared and if you click on it you may see the detailed figures for each one of the chapters, grouped by category.

The one thing I didn’t like much, again, is that WordPress.com is not enabling its users to directly embed this kind of gadgets into the blog… but this has a simple solution that I keep postponing…

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