Reader John Fletcher has set up a Taxcheck website that tells us how the government is spending our hard-earned tax dollars.

If you earn $50,000 a year, Taxcheck lists expenses ranging from a bargain 13 cents to pay for pharmaceuticals for Aboriginal people to $768 for granny’s pension.

The methodology is:

Estimates of income tax liabilities are calculated through a naive application of 2009/10 marginal income tax rates, with no accounting for the Medicare Levy, Low Income Tax Offset, Family Tax Benefits, or other potentially relevant factors. …The individual contribution to spending on each item in the above table is calculated as tax paid multiplied by that item’s share of total federal expenditure.

Though the numbers are approximate for most taxpayers, Taxcheck is a good idea. It brings the huge aggregate numbers in the budget papers down to figures more readily comprehensible to individual taxpayers.