Why are you seeing negative numbers?
In our application Outlays, aka expenditures, are written with positive numbers. There are many different types of expenditures. For example, the Department of Agriculture spent/is-spending/will-spend $2,010,000,000.00 on Foreign Agricultural Assistance in 2009.
Receipts, aka revenue, and/or income, are written with negative numbers. For example, in 2009, Individuals paid $953,006,000,000.00 dollars in Individual Income Taxes. On our website this number will be written as (remember all our numbers are in thousands of US dollars) -953,006,000.00. Remember, all negative numbers are some type of government revenue. For more information on the types of negative numbers please continue reading...
There are two kinds of negative numbers on our site: those you can adjust, and those that are nonadjustable and locked.
Adjustable Revenue: There are three types of adjustable revenue, Taxes, Misc. Fees, Fines, or Services, and Departmental Offsetting Receipts. Taxes are the main source of adjustable revenue and are located in the Taxes section of Balance the Budget. Individual income taxes, corporate income taxes, social security taxes, etc are all subject to your adjustments*. Misc. Fees, Fines, or Services are adjustable, and are located in the Revenue area of Balance the Budget, but we at Balance the Budget do not recommend serious adjustments to these sources of revenue. For example, the EPA charges fees for Premanufacture Notices (PMN's). In theory if you charged 10 billion dollars for each PMN issued the deficit would be gone. In practice though, the more you tax something (which is in essence what a fee is) the less of it you get. If you charged 10 billion dollars for each new PMN you might not get any new PMNs! We want you to be able to adjust some of these fees because a small increase in price might lead to an increase in revenue but don't get carried away.
Offsetting Departmental receipts are located in the Social Welfare and Bureaucracy section. There are many types and variations of offsetting receipts. For an example of an average offsetting receipt we'll show you two examples, one from the Department of the Interior and the other from the Department of Agriculture. The Department of the Interior gets revenue from the general public by collecting rents and charges for quarters, in the National Parks. In 2009 those rents and charges add-up-to/will-add-up-to about 20 million dollars. This number will be listed as -20,000.00 on our site. Occasionally a department will overestimate how much it needs for a certain program. For example the Department of Agricultural has to reassess their economic development loans. In 2009 for Economic Development Loans, there was a downward re-estimates of subsidies worth 3 million dollars. That number would show up as -3,000. Both of these numbers can be adjusted but like Misc. Fees, Fines, and Services we don't recommend that you adjust them much for the same reasons. There is one type of nonadjustable revenue: Misc. Gifts, Donations, Contributions, Forfeitures and Deposits. You cannot adjust the amount of money that people voluntarily send to the Treasury to help pay down the US Debt (in theory you can do this by adjusting tax incentives, but we won't go down that rabbit hole on the site...yet). The same is true for forfeitures. There is randomness involved here which is hard to make a policy around. So while you can see the revenue from nonadjustable sources you cannot adjust it due to the aforementioned reasons.
* Individual Income Taxes are capped at 70%, Social Security is capped at 25% and Medicare Taxes are capped at 5%. Due to issues of impossible revenue (you can't tax a rich guy for 125% of his income) we decided to arbitrarily cap those taxes at those amounts. Think about this scenario for a potential leftist/socialist user: a doctor makes 300,000 a year in wages and salaries. She doesn't have any investment income. Let's also pretend that 300,000 is also her adjusted gross income (or close enough to it). If you tax her income at an effective rate of 95%, her social security at 50% and her medicare tax at 10% then you will tax her for more than what she has. If that happens then the budget isn't really balanced and the tax revenue is incorrect and artificially inflated.