About our data
The Actual 2009 Overlays and Receipts are taken from the Office of Management and Budget, OMB. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/. The OMB is a semi-partisan organization. They are accountable to and serve the executive, and hence take their lead from the President. The past budgets can be viewed at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/browse.html where they are down-loadable. Nota Bene: the data is vague – categories are generalized and it will be hard to find line item specifics. However this is a great starting point. In the upcoming months our team will dig even deeper using department budgets.
The information/data on Revenue comes from three sources: 1) the OMB, 2) the IRS www.irs.gov, and 3) the Social Security Administration, www.ssa.gov. For the adjustable data our team used the IRS data on the breakdown of 2006 taxes and using statistical models re-proportioned the 2009 data. We know the total amount of Individual Income Tax receipts but we do not know the income break down – and we won't know that until 2012. We feel confident that our breakdown is close to what occurred.
Other helpful links:The Congressional Budget Office, www.cbo.gov. The CBO critiques the budget, and does studies on government programs. The CBO is non-partisan and an excellent source for information on any government endeavor whether or be the budget or the increase of health care costs in medicare and medicaid.
The Government Accountability Office, aka the GAO, www.gao.gov. This site is good for anyone who wants to research how efficient the government is. If you want to find wasteful, inefficient, or pork barrel programs this is the site to go to. They are non-partisan and are equally high quality as the CBO. There will be some overlap between the two sites, but the CBO is more geared towards the macro end of the spectrum, while the GAO looks often at micro interactions.
For information on the national debt see two sites: http://www.treas.gov/tic/, and http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/pd.htm.