A data essay
Everyone pays it, and almost everyone has a theory about where it goes: foreign aid, people who will not work, waste. This page puts the theory next to the ledger. The ledger is public, it is audited, and it does not look like the budget in anyone's head.
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The public pound
Here is everything the state spends in a year, cut into a hundred pennies. Every pound of income tax, National Insurance, VAT and duty ends up somewhere on this grid. Hover over any cell to see what it buys.
Three blocks dominate: working-age benefits, state pensions and health. Between them they take roughly half of every pound. None of the three features much in arguments about waste, because none of them feels like "spending". They feel like rights.
Then comes a block most people forget exists: interest on the national debt. It buys no hospital and employs no teacher, and it now costs more than the entire defence budget beside it.
And here is overseas aid, the item that dominates the argument: less than a single penny in the pound, 0.7p to be exact. Hold that cell in mind. The rest of this essay is about the distance between that penny and its reputation.
Before any more charts, commit to a number. Out of every £100 the government spends, how much do you think goes to overseas aid?
Whatever you guessed, the interesting question is why the true figure feels so implausible. Aid is argued about as if it were a main course. The accounts say garnish.
Survey after survey asks the public to estimate the budget, and the answers follow the news agenda, not the accounts. The items we argue about are inflated several times over; the items that actually dominate are shrunk to make room for them.
Start with aid. The brass dot is the public's average guess; the green dot is the audited figure. When YouGov asked people to divide their own income tax across the budget, aid was given five times its real share.
The same brass-and-green gap runs down the whole list, and it points one way for the villains and the other way for the giants. Fraud, Brussels, bureaucrats: guessed far too large. Welfare and health, the categories that actually dominate the pound: guessed far too small. The budget we argue about and the budget we pay for are different documents.
HMRC used to post everyone an Annual Tax Summary: your bill, split across the budget. Almost nobody read it, which is a shame, because it is the single best corrective to the imagined budget. So here it is, rebuilt. Enter your salary and see where your money went, down to the last penny.
Now press “the public's guess”. That second letter is the same bill redistributed the way YouGov's respondents divided their own income tax when asked in 2014. Notice what happens to your aid and EU lines, and what quietly shrinks to make room for them. The gap between the two letters is the subject of this essay, priced in your own money.
Say "the benefits bill" and a specific picture forms: someone of working age, not working. The DWP publishes exactly what the bill contains, line by line. The picture and the lines have almost nothing in common.
Here is the whole bill, item by item. Before reading on, find the line that matches the picture in your head.
The largest single item, by a distance, is the state pension, with pensioner top-ups beside it. Most benefit money goes to people who have retired, exactly as designed, and to disabled people and working families next.
And the benefit aimed squarely at the picture in your head, Jobseeker's Allowance, is the smallest line on the chart: £0.3bn, a tenth of a penny in every benefits pound. Part of Universal Credit also supports people looking for work, and the tables do not split it, but every published estimate puts the unemployed's share of the bill in low single digits. The word "benefits" and the arithmetic of benefits have drifted a long way apart.
The giant with no constituency deserves its own chart. For two decades, cheap borrowing kept the interest bill flat and forgettable, hovering near £35bn a year whatever else the economy did. Then inflation returned, rates followed, and the bill tripled in three years.
Every pound spent on interest is a pound taxed but not turned into any service. It is the price of past borrowing, paid at whatever rate the market sets, and it now rivals whole departments that people would strike to defend.
A country that misreads its own budget makes predictable mistakes. It fights over pennies and waves through the pounds. Cutting the most overestimated line in the accounts feels like serious money and saves almost none; the categories that actually move the total, pensions, health, debt interest, are the ones no argument ever touches.
The ledger is public and always has been. The only thing this page adds is your name on it.