Want to know which presidential candidate will mean more money in your pocketbook? Of course you do, and now a new web application is aiming to help you do just that — predict which candidate will boost your bottom line.
Politify allows users to enter basic financial information like salary or capital gains, along with some other personal details such as age and zip code, to calculate the financial impact of each candidate's fiscal plans.
Politify, which says it's nonpartisan, launched Thursday. Founder Nikita Bier, who describes himself as a "radical moderate," said he wanted to build a clear, unbiased platform that could show voters how each candidate's policies could affect them.
"I'd always been really frustrated with the way politics gets carried out in the United States," Bier said. "This is policy that impacts our well-being, and the purpose of government is to enhance our well-being. When we choose to ignore that, we elect wrong candidates."
To determine financial projections under President Barack Obama, the app uses the fiscal data from the White House 2013 budget proposal, found on the White House website. For Mitt Romney, the app uses data from his financial plan 'Mitt Romney's Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth,'found on the GOP presidential hopeful's campaign website.
Bier, who said he doesn't affiliate with either political party, studies political economy and business administration at the University of California at Berkeley, and has his alma mater to thank for helping get his project off the ground.
Politify originally received $20,000 in funding from Berkeley's Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) earlier this year.
Bier also received $15,000 from the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that aims to bring transparency to politics via the Internet.
While Politify currently only focuses on how voters' finances could be affected by the election, it will expand to assess the impact of the policies as they are carried out and as new policies are put in place after the presidential inauguration, Nikita said.
Go ahead and click here to see whether you'd be better off under Obama or Romney.
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