After griping with some other commentators at Informed Banking about Chase’s credit card interest rate hikes, I felt like the banks are becoming another way to tax citizens.

Thinking that there are enough taxes, I searched for a site about how the government spends its money. Took awhile to find the site I wanted, so here it is for future reference:

How the US Federal Government Spends Your Taxes

Its actually very cool that the site has an API (application programming interface) too, but its basically just an XML file download utility, and it limits the data to 1000 records.

I’ve just downloaded the same data from the Census Bureau for 2008. I really wish the US Government would use open source technology more - that’s just one example of government waste. Why use *.zip and *.xls instead of gzip and open office formats?

At least some of the sites use CSV!