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JohnAllen
The denominator should be tax receipts, not federal spending. Foreign countries and our Federal Reserve actually made large contributions this past year (both do every year we have a budget deficit and every year the money supply increases- this is most every year for the past few decades). This is not to suggest that Americans won't eventually pay for all of this year's expenditures, we eventually will. In the case of the Fed, consider the new money printing and subsequent spending by the Fed to be a tax on everyone that holds dollars at the time of the printing/spending.
viggity
I don't think this is right, I think they've done a straight percentage for each item, but your FICA contributions should cap at about 15K for SS and Medicare because it is approx 15% of the first ~$100K (for 2009) and you don't pay anything beyond that. Medicaid while part of FICA doesn't have a cap on earnings (its around 2.5%). If you tell this page that you've paid 100K in taxes, it says that you've paid $30K total to FICA.

Now, part of the way Obama was proposing to pay for health care reform was to kill the cap on the earnings that are subject FICA taxes - without any additional benefit. This would fundamentally change SS from an insurance scheme to a wealth redistribution scheme.

(for those of you outside the US. FICA is an umbrella term for Social Security and Medicare)

volare
Thanks for the reality check. I threw this up on a whim after skimming this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1745133. It was fun, regardless, because I suspected I was competing with others to get it done first. I spent about 20 minutes getting it functional and another 15 making it prettier.
throw_away
agreed. a better approach would be to take the amount you made per year and recalculate the fica vs. not-fica amounts. other interesting features that could be added would be a pie-chart of the data and also, how various legislation would change the mix and the total.