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Visualize This: Days Spent Working to Pay Taxes (April 16 to April 30)

Started 2 years ago by nathany / 20 posts

  1. nathany
    FlowingData Editor
    Posted 2 years ago #

    About 28.2% of the average American's income goes towards taxes, which means the first 103 days of the year is to pay for government. At the end of these 103 days - April 13 - is Tax Freedom Day. However, because of varying state-by-state tax burdens and average incomes, Tax Freedom Day varies by state. Alaska, for example, has the earliest Tax Freedom Day (March 23) because it has low state and local taxes while Connecticut is last on April 30, because of "extraordinarily high federal income taxes." For this Visualize This we're looking at the number of days each state spends paying taxes this year (2009).

    Your Mission

    As with previous Visualize This segments, show us your best shot at visualizing the Tax Freedom Day data in this forum thread. I've put the data in an Excel spreadsheet that you can find at the bottom of the forum post.

    Map? Graphs? Both? Let's see what you've got. Oh, and most importantly, have fun.

    Find more information about the data here.

    Deadline: April 30, 2009

  2. joemako
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    Seems like you are missing seven states in your data:
    UTAH
    VERMONT
    VIRGINIA
    WASHINGTON
    WEST VIRGINIA
    WISCONSIN
    WYOMING

    not an issue, just strange that they are not in your .xls file, because all the data is on http://taxfoundation.org/taxfreedomday/

  3. nathany
    FlowingData Editor
    Posted 2 years ago #

    Oops, something got lost in the import. I've updated the spreadsheet to include all the states. Thanks, Joe.

  4. alexlundry
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    You can also find historical TFD state data going back to 1970 here: http://taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/22328.html

  5. joemako
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    In the attached Dashboard, the left side makes it easy to find your state, and the right side gives you an overall view of how the states trend. I also attached a Histogram that shows a nice view of the data. Tableau is my software of choice.

    [attachment=623,100] [attachment=623,101]

  6. nathany
    FlowingData Editor
    Posted 2 years ago #

    Ah, the power of Tableau. Very nice, sir. Speedy.

  7. JackCroww
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    Any good affordable visualization tools out there? $999 for Tableau for a simple guy like me to play around with numbers seems a bit steep.

  8. nathany
    FlowingData Editor
    Posted 2 years ago #

    R? http://r-project.org

  9. triceam
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    I threw together a basic interactive Adobe Flex based visualization, which is available online here:
    http://cynergysystems.com/blogs/page/andrewtrice?entry=visualizing_you_taxes_with_flex

    -Andrew Trice

  10. Rich
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    Wow those are both pretty sweet. I was going to try to throw together something in Excel, but now I'm not sure that it's worth it!

    Andrew, is it hard to learn Flex?

  11. nathany
    FlowingData Editor
    Posted 2 years ago #

    @Rich - we accept viz in all shapes and sizes

  12. annie
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    Here's a JavaScript visualization I did with a calendar and a list of states:

    http://annielausier.com/viz/taxfreedom/

    Since there are two ways to browse the data - by date or by state - you can hover over either to see the other.

  13. nathany
    FlowingData Editor
    Posted 2 years ago #

    @annie - love it!

  14. fjania
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    I uploaded a dataset to ManyEyes and came up with this visualization:

    Untitled

    In playing around with a bit (and copying / rereading the description from the initial post) it seems like the real story here is a bit occluded by the fact that state average incomes aren't normalized, so we have no idea how much tax burden varies state to state

    It would be particularly interesting to see how these tax burdens relate to the services which the state provides, and the overall welfare of the citizens of that state.

  15. rachel
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    Here is your data set (used to test our tool).
    We also crossed unemployment figures for feb 2009 per US state(source: business week).

    It's here: http://bit.ly/Az2Et

    I hope California will spend a large amount of taxes collected to help new unemployed.
    Feedbacks are welcome :)

    Merci beaucoup!

  16. triceam
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    Rich, No, it's not hard to learn Flex. There are a lot of easy to use data viz components you can take advantage of out-of-the-box. However, It does require an understanding of programming concepts.

  17. couvares
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    I posted a chart of this data to our blog yesterday after one of our users uploaded the Tax Freedom Day data set. I wondered about the implications of low taxes for a state’s population, searched for other data sets to join it with (by state), and came up with this:

    (Click through for the interactive version.)

    It's also worth following the link I have above to "methodological issues" to see why it might be better not to describe Tax Freedom Day as "the number of days spent working to pay taxes". The Tax Foundation's figures don't really correspond to that, even though their clever choice of words implies it does.

  18. alexlundry
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    I wanted to try out Verifiable.com a little more, and here's what I came up with (hope this works, similar to the post above, you should be able to click through for an interactive version):

  19. alexlundry
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    And here's one more go, this time using UUorld's mapping software to animate states' TFD rank over time, posted as a narrated video (under 1 min):

    http://bit.ly/tfd_vid4

  20. alexlundry
    Member
    Posted 2 years ago #

    Somehow lost the Verifiable chart that I had previously posted. Here's the repost:


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