Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Winner of Google's Data Viz Challenge for Visualizing Tax Data
In February, Google challenged its users to present tax data in an exciting way, utilizing video, graphics, and text to turn information into understanding. Out of over 40 projects, Google chose Anil Kandangath and his site Where Did My Tax Dollars Go? as the winner. This site breaks down your tax payments into a pie chart and a flow chart, showing you dollar for dollar where your money went.
If you use the equation that the site prompts you with (paying $5000 and filing as "single"), you end up contributing $54 to community and regional development and $111 for commerce and housing credits, which are some of the smallest fractions of the pie chart. Do you feel like your money is being allocated in the correct way?
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Cool video with some very "sexy" charts unfortunately it went so fast I couldn't see any.
ReplyDeleteI do like the website in that it provides graphical representation with good color, but this data is really nothing new to me. I think almost everyone is aware that medicare and social security eat up the majority of taxes we pay. I would like to see my taxes re-proportioned, but unfortunately this is easier said then done as people have been talking about it for years with very little progress.
Yeah, I have seen this before. I think Dr. McKinney has shown this to us in ECON101. I am not sure. Plus you can listen to this in other languages!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Chris this breakdown of the taxes being paid is nothing new.
ReplyDeleteWhile I like the clarity and colors used it doesn’t make the taxes you pay any different. I would like to see the tax brackets re-examined. Taxing the top five percent of Americans is not going to fix our country’s problems, it’s a quick fix that will have consequences later down the line. The majority of our taxes go to social security and medicare. When the healthcare debate started one of the main points President Obama made was that the way medicare and medicade were being run we were wasting a large sum of money. How is it that we have not fixed those two programs to make them more efficient in terms of economics and service? Why is it budgets granted by the federal government to programs, state governments, education, etc. have to be used up in a certain amount of time? Why can’t unused money rolled over to the next year?
The bottom line is we need to cut spending. Across the board budgets will have to be cut because spending will not get us out of debt.
Funding is not being allocated in a sustainable fashion. Social security should not be included in budget because it is a public trust fund. However, this system and others, such as defense and medicare, are not efficient. Government funds can be differently allocated in order to increase social welfare.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Chris. Very pretty graphs and charts but nothing new to me.
ReplyDelete