Who Do You Trust?
Mistrust in the government has always been relevant in American culture, but in the past decade or so, this mistrust is becoming more widely agreed upon. A vast majority of Americans today have a negative view of the federal government and with that comes great skepticism on spending. With the 2016 election as well as the 2020 election, breaking records for campaign spending, more and more Americans are feeling that politics are becoming centered around money more now than ever before. But where is all this money going?
This overall mistrust in our governments financial agenda is very detrimental to the public and global perspective of our Nation. People want to be able to understand and believe that the government is using taxpayers’ dollars as well as government funding for the benefit of the public, not just themselves. To get a better understanding of elected official spending, I will be analyzing ‘2021Q3-house-disburse-detail.csv’ combined with ‘house_members.csv’ files. These sources will enable me to see spending amounts according to state, house member, purpose of spending and the category the purpose falls into. We will be able to see the details of 2021’s house member spending and come to conclusions about these transactions.
After analyzing and understanding these datasets, I decided I wanted to look at the overall spending patterns across all elected officials in office in the year 2021, and specifically see what categories of spending are the highest across the board. Knowing that these personnel, no matter from what political party or state, are going to spend money on things such as Food and Beverages, Equipment, Franked Mail, and other categories that are essential and obvious expenses that would be present. Because of this, I decided to widen my horizons to analyze expenses that would be more shocking, such as; Travel, Utilities, and Personal Compensation. These three categories seem to be areas where an elected official should be using their own income to cover these expenses.
Using the dataset and python programming, I iterated through the data to create data tables combining both previously stated csv files. After analyzing the data sets and creating a bar graph demonstrating the relationship between categories of spending and spending amount in the year 2021, we can clearly see that ‘Personal Compensation’ is the highest spending category overall.
The “Personal Compensation” category is by far the most spent category, way beyond categories which I hypothesized to be large such as “Supplies and Materials” (food and beverage fall into this category). These results, although disheartening, are not entirely shocking. Personal Compensation can mean an array of different things however still should not be exponentially higher than the rest of the categories let alone the rest of the categories combined.
Having doubts and skepticism about the government and governmental spending is healthy in creating expectations for our Nation. It is important we do our research on topics we are skeptical about before we create and spread conspiracies. Holding each other and people in positions of power accountable is crucial for our democracy to thrive, and educating ourselves and each other is the first step to reaching mutual trust and transparency between the people and power.
