bq. iGov would offer citizens an easy way to track their relationship with the federal government over their lifetimes. Each citizen would have his or her own iGov account, through which the federal government would be able to present the accumulation of the benefits that a person has ever received from across the government. A single click would reveal what the government has meant in a person’s life, in the most concrete terms.
Specifically, iGov would offer all Americans the chance to see their income, taxes paid on that income and personal benefits received. Costs, meanwhile, would be reflected via a longitudinal version of the taxpayer receipt we proposed in our earlier articles. For programs harder to quantify on a per-citizen basis, like roads and education, agencies could show costs and benefits via Google maps.
From a proposal by Ethan Porter and David Kendall (shorter version; longer version). My quick-and-dirty analysis of the tax receipt is here, with further discussion here. As someone interested in whether factual information about politics affects political attitudes, I’d like to see what effect iGov might have.