Most Americans have opinions about taxes and government spending. Some believe taxes are too high, while others believe that schools, roads, public safety, and other public services are underfunded. These are legitimate differences in priorities and preferences. But how well-informed are these opinions?

Government budgets are typically presented in millions, billions, or even trillions of dollars. While these figures are accurate, they are difficult for most people to relate to their everyday lives. What does a $5 billion budget mean for a typical household? Is $100 million for a particular public service a lot or a little? Without additional context, even well-intentioned citizens may struggle to make sense of government finances.

This creates an important challenge for American democracy. Citizens cannot make fully informed choices about taxes, public spending, and government priorities without a meaningful understanding of what public services cost and what they receive in return.

Making the numbers relatable

One way to make government budgets more understandable is to express financial information in terms that people can relate to.

Consider a hypothetical local government with an annual budget of $1.2 billion, serving 200,000 residents and 80,000 households. The same budget can be expressed in several ways:

How the budget is presented	Amount
Total annual expenditure	$1.2 billion
Annual expenditure per resident	$6,000
Annual expenditure per household	$15,000
Monthly expenditure per household	$1,250

Each figure represents the same amount of government spending, but provides a different perspective. For many residents, understanding that their local government spends the equivalent of $1,250 per household per month is more meaningful than hearing that its annual budget is $1.2 billion.

Importantly, public spending per household is not the same as taxes paid by each household. Governments receive revenues from multiple sources, including businesses, other levels of government, and fees and charges. These figures represent the average cost of public services, not the tax bill of an individual household.

Connecting spending to public services

Making budget figures relatable is only part of the challenge. Citizens also need to understand what government spends money on, and what services are provided in return.

Rather than presenting public spending as a single aggregate amount, budgets should show how resources are distributed across major functions and programs, such as public education, transportation, public safety, health, and other services.

Where practical, these amounts can also be expressed on a per-person or per-household basis. This allows residents to better understand the relative cost of different services and how public resources are allocated.

For example, knowing that a local government spends $1,250 per household per month is useful. Knowing how much of that amount goes toward public schools, police and fire protection, roads, parks, libraries, and other services is considerably more informative.

Ideally, financial information should also be accompanied by meaningful indicators of service delivery and performance. How many students are served? What is the condition of local roads? How quickly do emergency services respond? How do costs and outcomes compare with those of similar communities?

The goal is to connect public spending with public services and results—not simply to report how much money government spends.

Supporting informed public choices

Public budgeting is ultimately about choices. Governments must decide how to allocate limited resources among competing priorities, while citizens must consider what services they want and how much they are willing to pay for them.

These choices are central to democratic governance. Calls for lower taxes, improved schools, better roads, or expanded public safety services all involve tradeoffs. Yet citizens are rarely presented with public finance information in a form that allows them to assess these tradeoffs meaningfully.

In everyday life, households routinely make decisions by comparing costs and benefits. They understand the monthly cost of housing, transportation, utilities, and other expenses. Public budgets should make it similarly possible to understand the cost of government services and the choices involved in providing them.

This does not mean that citizens will necessarily agree about the appropriate size or role of government. Nor should they. A healthy democracy allows for different preferences and priorities. But public debate is more productive when those differences are informed by a shared understanding of basic facts.

From public information to informed participation

Making budgets more understandable is not simply a matter of better financial reporting. It is an essential part of creating a more informed and engaged public.

Citizens who understand how government raises and spends money are better positioned to ask meaningful questions, evaluate competing policy proposals, participate in public hearings, and hold elected officials accountable.

State and local governments therefore have a responsibility to do more than publish financial documents and datasets. They should make a deliberate effort to present public information in ways that are accessible, relatable, and useful to the people they serve.

The Virginia Civic Observatory seeks to contribute to this goal by presenting federal, state, and local government finances in understandable terms, connecting spending to public services, and providing citizens with the information and tools needed to participate more effectively in public decisions.

Because meaningful democracy requires more than access to information. It requires information that people can understand, use, and act upon.

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