Mittbucks.com Lets Voters Compare Their Paychecks With Romney's
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Friday, February 10 2012
What would it take for Mitt Romney to be able to relate to the average American's daily economic life?
He'd have to pay $1,208.09 for a gallon of gas, according to Mittbucks.com, a web site recently created by Adam Rosenscruggs and his wife Danielle in Washington, D.C.
The eye-popping figure results from an annual income that I plugged in of $51,914. That was the median household income in the United States between 2006 and 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. (I did not assume any taxes in that number.)
According to Mittbucks.com, for every dollar made by someone in a median income household, Romney made $360.62.
After plugging in an income number, the site calculates not only how much Romney made in 2010 compared to whoever's plugging in the number, but it also calculates how much an everyday artifact of life would have to cost him for him to experience life the way the site user would.
Rosenscruggs, a fundraising consultant for non-profits in Washington, D.C., said he created the site recently after reading news stories about Romney's wealth and his tax returns.
His goal, he said, was to help people to relate to someone who earns more than $20 million a year. Rosenscruggs says his ideal presidential candidate is self-described "Democratic socialist" Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, so it's no surprise that he disagrees vehemently with Romney's economic policies.
He said he was motivated philosophical disagreement with Romney's approach to taxation, arguing that someone earning as much as Romney shouldn't object to having their tax rates increased, as it wouldn't affect them as tangibly as those lower down the income ladder.
"That’s the thing that makes me angry: People don’t understand how disconnected his policies are, and in my view, it’s because he can’t possibly understand the life of someone who makes $100,000 a year much less $40,000 a year," he said.
The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Mittbucks.com.
With a bit more finesse, one could imagine a little project like this coming from the Democratic National Committee or President Obama's re-election effort in the general election. In this case it came from an impassioned voter who deeply disagrees with the policies advocated by a presidential candidate, and as such is an interesting manifestation of the idea of a citizen-coder-activist expressing their political point of view in a way that goes beyond writing an angry online screed.
“This was me, my wife and Google,” says Rosenscruggs, who learned some of the site's web code by Googling online tutorials and following them. (He also referred to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for guidance on the average prices of everyday items of consumers' lives.) “For someone who went to school for this, or does it for a living, they could have whipped it up in an hour … when people in their 20s get a bit older and pay more attention to politics, everyone’s going to have their little code-as-speech blog somewhere.”
As a new generation of Americans grow up learning the basics of coding as a regular part of their education, and more open government data and factoids about life in the 21st century becomes available online, who knows what they'll come up with?