We acquired a filing cabinet full of data available only on paper, and 25 megabytes directly from government computers via modem. Since this was primarily a numbers project, we moved everything into a spreadsheet Borland's Quattro Pro for Windows. We used Quattro to build 3-D spreadsheets with each topic - the breakout on federal spending, for example - in a separate sheet that cranked its results into the master sheet.
This kept the master sheet simple enough to be read by person other than Werner Von Braun. "The Tax on Living" ran every day for more than two weeks, ending the day before the election. It showed that the average Connecticut family was paying a little over 50 percent of their income in taxes and how those taxes made it financially attractive for businesses such as UPS to pay to move their operations to other states.
It showed that 42 percent of the cost of a bottle of liquor and more than 50 cents on every gallon of gasoline went for taxes. It showed taxes where people expected - on gas - and where no one would have ever guessed - one on gas pump nozzles and another for pump gauges. It also showed the money was being spent less than wisely. Not only did Congress increase its budget 17 percent last year, the money provided for things such as the House and Senate photo studios and radio and television studios.
And then there's overhead. We obtained government figures that showed more than $300 billion went for overhead - rents, telephone and utility bills and airfare, among other things. (That's the total for the entire federal budget, not a separate appropriation.) That doesn't include a dime for programs or salaries. Perhaps the biggest fuss occurred after we obtained an internal Congressional document that revealed the ugly truth about the Social Security Trust Fund: There isn't one.
All Social Security taxes go straight into the treasury, where they are spent just like the rest of the taxes. The money is replaced with "IOUs," the document went on to say. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut, called the system a sham, a fraud, and said it amounted to nothing more than flim-flam. You always wonder if a project like this has any effect. We know it was read. We were deluged with calls and letters, and many readers took the time to fill out and mail us a do-it-yourself total tax form we printed.
The key to this series was putting families and faces on the numbers. It is one thing to explain that X amount of dollars are going out in taxes. It is another to show photos of the family paying thousands in taxes and have them explain they can't afford allergy shots for their child.