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Public projects are funded through taxes, tariffs, fines, fees, and borrowing.
Ideally, specific revenues should be traceable to specific public projects.
However, funding sources of governmental projects and services are not easy to understand.
There are many reasons for this:

• Presenting the balance sheet clearly for so much moving money is a logistical challenge.
• Money received or borrowed may be transferred through many accounts, agencies, governments, and private companies before reaching its outlay target.
  • Much revenue is often consolidated in a general fund and therefore is not targeted to specific projects initially.
  • Offsetting Income (which offsets expenses targeted to defined projects – now or in the future) may be either:
     1) received into an offsetting collection account – with a balancing offsetting expense account authorized separately, or
     2) put into revolving account, which requires no further spending authorization.
  • Some receipts go into trust funds which may or may not be targeted for future projects vaguely defined.
  • Interest earned on trust funds may provide funding for future projects, or may be used to pay down debt for otherwise unfunded projects in the past/present.
  • Interest spent on borrowed money may constitute a huge portion of future tax revenue and drive up living costs for the citizenry.
     1) This may promote an imperative to spend more on governmental programs to relieve financial stresses that it created.
     2) Eliminating a spending threshold creates a disconnect between the merits of enforcing policy and the demerits of collecting resources to promote that policy.

In political settings, the benefits of public projects and services are often presented without discussion of the revenue source used to support them.

Under these circumstances, it is difficult to see the cost/benefit of governmental actions and to evaluate whether or not we, the people, want these services.

Hopefully, BudgetCraft can help to make some of these details and trends more visible: unfunded/underfunded projects, heavy borrowing, and potentially undesireable receipts and expenditures.
If public projects are worthwhile for their cost, it should be evident in the accounting - which should be clearly visible to the public.