If you were intrigued by GOOD Magazine's breakdown of your gas dollars last week ("Fuel for thought"), you'll probably like what the National Priorities Project (NPP) is doing. NPP's business is to untangle byzantine government spending and present those figures in simple visual and comparative forms so that "people can understand and influence how their tax dollars are spent."

Take energy, for instance. NPP just released a report on "The Military Cost of Securing Energy," which analyzes how much the U.S. spends via the military to "defend U.S. energy concerns overseas." The report estimates that the military spends up to 30 percent of its annual budget to secure access to energy resources internationally. You can click on your state to see how it ranks in energy use and how funds the U.S. now spends on securing energy abroad could be used locally to change that picture.

In fact, as the name "priorities project" implies, much of what NPP does entails making tradeoffs. Thus, NPP's tradeoff tool allows you to "Select your state, town, county or congressional district and a program, and find out what else your tax dollars could provide." There's an amazing array of "social math" you can draw on here. Take a look also at the interactive tax chart, in which the user specifies tax dollars paid last year and receives back a breakdown of where those tax dollars ended up.

These are the sorts of specifics that strengthen an advocacy case by attaching not only meat (data), but also making that information meaningful by comparing it to a need that is going unmet. This kind of comparative argument technique will not always win the day -- activists have been making "guns versus butter" arguments about how much the country could be doing with the funding the military receives for decades, to little avail -- but it's a great way to hold legislators' feet to the fire when there is a critical issue up for debate (like U.S. energy policy) and the budget needs to catch up to the rhetoric.