I was impressed by the Where Does My Money Go? – an interactive visualization interface to the UK government budget. If one ignores the painful color scheme (see below), the interactivity of exploring the data is notable.
One particularly interesting aspect is a regional spending breakdown, which shows which regions are contributing to the budget and which ones are disproportionally benefiting from it.
The British also have a great website that quantitatively analyzes the behavior in their parliament: Public Whip.
Not a statistics comment, though I find some graphical views on the site are easier to take than others – and the British sense of color differs from ours. Note that defense comes in at 37B pounds out of a total of 620B and then compare that percentage to what we spend and one can see a) how we have built a huge budget hole, b) that we divert a significant portion of our resources toward relatively non-economic defense and c) that any issues of cost regarding health, etc. are directly related to military spending.
Interesting terminology the government uses. Vague and generic.
"Social Protection", the orange bars, account for 15% of GDP. And quite a few things that one might reasonably expect to fall into this category are in other categories, which serves to disguise the fact that the vast bulk of spending is social services.
Defense is pretty small – 2.5% of GDP. Of course, that is one of the few legitimate functions of a central government.
Regarding the colours – if you are interested you should check out the course slides on graphics by Ross Ihaka (on of the R's in R) (link below). Some great lessons there in graphics and R.
One of the take away lessons for me was that many quite 'ugly' colour schemes have an upside: more men than I would guess can't see the difference between more aesthetically pleasing colours.
I don't know how this scheme compares to his advices, but the contrast between the stacks seems very high.
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/?Teaching