Source note: Local copy of a Summer Into AI 2026 submission originally published on Substack. Screenshots, video, and audio found in the post body are mirrored locally when publicly accessible; profile and avatar images are intentionally not copied. Read the canonical post.
This is my fourth submission for Data.Punk, week three of Summer into AI.
The prompt was go get that ‘murica data, and I kept snagging on one dataset everybody technically owns and nobody ever actually sees: what the government does with your money. It spent $7,009,973,667,049 last fiscal year. It has never once mailed you an itemized receipt for your share. So I built the receipt.
Wait, what is this?
You type in what you paid in federal tax last year, and The Broadside prints you a receipt — to the dollar — of where it went. Social Security, Medicare, the military, all of it, line by line, sorted big to small, the way a store hands you a slip without being asked. Slide your number and the whole thing re-prints live. It’s the one document the largest spender in human history somehow never produces.
Live from the Treasury, no server
I assumed I’d have to hard-code the numbers. Turns out the U.S. Treasury runs a public API — fiscaldata.treasury.gov — and it’s wide open (CORS and everything), so the grand total is pulled live, in your browser, the moment you load the page, straight off the government’s own books. Nothing gets sent to any server of mine; it all runs on your machine. I cross-checked the line items against that same feed while building it, and Social Security and Veterans’ spending match Treasury to the dollar. That was the moment it stopped feeling like a toy and started feeling like a receipt.
The part they’d rather you didn’t add up
Then the numbers start doing the talking:
You paid more just to cover interest on money the government already borrowed than you paid for the entire military. Interest is now the third-largest thing the federal government does — about 7× what you chipped in for NASA, all of foreign aid, and every national park combined, which are the three things everyone’s convinced are bankrupting us. And for every $1 you actually paid, Washington spent $1.34 — the other 34¢ was borrowed in your name and stapled to a $36-trillion tab.
A palette I had to throw out
Confession, in the spirit of showing the work: my first pass was neon — acid green and hot magenta on black. Then I actually looked at what Kyle Sebeysten has been shipping this week (Falling Sky, Complaint Machine) and realized I’d basically put on his jacket. So I scrapped the neon and pulled the colors out of the subject itself: cash green, stamp red, treasury gold, on cream. Now the color does an argument — green is what you got, red is what you owe, and the rubber stamp is red because real stamps are red. Thanks Kyle for the (entirely unintentional) art-direction note.
On the theme
Go get that ‘murica data. This is the most ‘murica data there is — your taxes — and it’s technically public and functionally invisible, buried in Treasury tables nobody opens. Punk isn’t building another dashboard on top of it. Punk is taking the government’s own live numbers and handing them back to the person who paid, itemized, with the uncomfortable total printed at the bottom. They were never going to build this. So I did.
And thank you Eric — Data.Punk is the theme that sent me after the one dataset everybody owns and nobody reads.
Print your receipt
🧾 Live (runs entirely in your browser): https://myles-mf.github.io/summer-into-ai-2026/week-3/broadside/
💾 Source, one file — read the Treasury fetch: https://github.com/myles-mf/summer-into-ai-2026/blob/main/week-3/broadside/index.html
🗂️ Everything I’ve built for the contest: https://myles-mf.github.io/summer-into-ai-2026/
✍️ Also written up on my site: https://merlinforge.com/blog/broadside-week-3/
I’ve stared at that $7-trillion number a dozen times now and it still doesn’t fit in my head. Maybe that’s the point of a receipt — not to shock you, just to make it itemized. Punk isn’t dead. It’s compiling.
Original source
Canonical Substack URL: https://merlinforge.substack.com/p/the-broadside.