Taxes, Wrapped
Your federal tax dollars, itemized to the last screw. The Spotify Wrapped treatment for the bill you already paid.
The why
The federal budget is a $7 trillion blur. The numbers are so large your brain doesn't really know what to do with them, and the debt is something our political class has agreed to keep can-kicking down the road. Mowing my lawn one afternoon listening to David Friedberg and Ray Dalio on All In, I kept landing on the same thing: the ideas for how to fix this aren't in short supply. Voter attention is. Almost nobody can feel their actual stake in the number.
Meanwhile, the end of every year is now the wrapped moment. Spotify Wrapped, Granola Crunch, LinkedIn's year-in-review. We've all gotten used to data being handed back to us in a form that's fun, weirdly personal, and shareable. April rolls around six weeks later and people are still mid-zeitgeist when they sit down to do their taxes. What if the most boring civic moment of the year borrowed the cinematic, share-it-with-the-group-chat energy of the wrapped season that just ended?
The goal: collapse the distance between "the government spent" and "you spent." Not to take a side. To make the data feel like data about you.
What I was thinking
Punch in your federal tax amount (IRS Form 1040, Line 24). The app kinetically counts up from zero to your number, then walks you through a hypothetical, proportional receipt of where those dollars actually go. Roughly 600 line items in the database, and the design intent is to get weirdly specific. A used, kind of gross coffee filter somewhere in the budget. A weather buoy bobbing off the coast. A wing on an F-16. Your fraction of all of them, side by side, in the same monospaced receipt.
At the end you get one of 12 Taxpayer Personas, sectioned loosely by bracket but randomized enough that two friends comparing at lunch get a slightly different read. Then a shareable 9:16 card, with optional amount-blurring because not everyone wants their group chat knowing what they paid.
Design language I called Vibrant Nihilism: deep charcoal, neon green, safety orange, monospaced data, tongue-in-cheek micro-copy. Serverless on purpose, so the app never sees or stores your number. The whole thing is meant to rise above the partisan headlines for a second and remind people that we are, in fact, on one team paying into the same pot.