Alpha Version of the Budgetizer

We’ve just put out the alpha of a simple interactive tool — the ‘Budgetizer’ that let’s you explore what has been happening to UK finances in recent years, and what the impact of recent budgets have been.

To do this we’ve been busy collecting (and cleaning) government time series include projections from 2008, 2010 (before the budget) and 2010 (after the budget), into the google spreadsheet below. Each projection is contained in a different sheet. At present this is only at the level of GDP, total expenditure, total taxation, deficit etc. There’s also a description sheet which gives a bit of information about the structure.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tFggM4NNja9rSzUd_qQTv9w#gid=4

An initial view of a couple of sheets of this work are now available in the budgetizer:

http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/budget/budgetizer/

This is very much an alpha visualisation – the main thing at this stage is the code to read from multiple sheets and visusalise them as graphs.

Even with this simple view, you can see that while the annual overspend (expenditure over receipts) falls under the post-budget plan, the total deficit remains huge compared to GDP (compared to where it has been over the last 30 years)

Having built this, the plan is to add features to allow users to interactively experiment with different senarios. Even doing this roughly is quite a lot harder as it requires projecting the consequence of changes of policy multiple years into the future.