About This Project

Every April, Americans file their taxes and watch a number leave their account. It's big. It's abstract. And then it's gone — somewhere into the federal budget, a document so large no single person has read it.

Taxes, Wrapped makes that number concrete.

You enter what you paid in federal income tax. We give you back a receipt — representative line items grounded in real agencies, real programs, and realistic government price ranges. Not what you specifically funded (tax revenue is pooled), but a plausible picture of what a budget your size is proportionally part of.

A 200kW ferry bow thruster. A calibrated ocean CTD probe. 100 zip ties at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. A power wheelchair battery at the Richmond VA Medical Center. These are the kinds of things the federal government actually buys, at prices grounded in how government procurement actually works. The specific transactions are illustrative — the scale and specificity are the point.

The point isn't outrage or celebration. It's recognition. The federal budget isn't an abstraction — it's ten thousand line items that keep an enormous, complicated country running. Most of them anonymous. Most of them necessary. Most of them invisible until now.