Get Adobe Flash player

In the Red: Where Your Money Went in 2010

If you're anything like me, filling out your yearly tax forms is a dreaded slog through forms, schedules, pay stubs, and other scraps of paper with arcane numbers and codes printed on them. Then, after a weekend of reading and re-reading, you send your tax forms to the IRS. Hopefully you're in for a little refund. But for those less fortunate ones, their civic act culminates in a check made out to Uncle Sam. Once you hand over your due, where does it go? Ever wonder just what it means to your bottom line if you're married but file separately from your spouse? or what if you're single? How much of a difference does it make if I take that raise at work?

  1. When the visualization starts and you're zoomed out, the shade of red on each person indicates the percentage of your income that they have to pay in taxes. The lighter the shade, the smaller the percentage and vice versa.

  2. Next, click and drag the people left and right. There are a lot more people than what you can see at first

  3. Then click on a person in the grid that you're interested in based on their filing status and amount they earn. See how much they pay in taxes, how much they take home, and exactly where their money was spent by the government. From here you can click any of the adjacent people along the edges to slide them into view to see how they compare.

* notes

  • This visualization takes advantage of a dynamic API. Depending on the speed of your internet connection, it may load faster or slower for others. If you see some gears spinning on a person's head, you won't be able to interact with that person yet. But as the data is loaded for a person (the gears go away), you will be able to immediately start exploring those datasets.

  • I can hear someone exclaiming: "This is wrong! I earned X dollars last year and I'm due for a refund!" Well, consider yourself lucky! This data does not take into account exemptions, stimulus money, donations, or bank errors in your favor. It keeps things on a little more of a level playing field.

who made this?

created by Joseph Bergen for datavizchallenge.org

tools

  • Adobe Flash
  • Adobe Illustrator

geek stuff

The swf contains about 400 lines of ActionScript —which includes comments, whitespace, etc— in a single frame and weighs in at 100kb. 99% of assets are dynamically generated (only a couple of the labels are not). I use the ever amazing TweenLite library to assist with the motion, and the practical BulkLoader library to help take care of the loading of so much data. See a sample of the raw data (you have to view the page source to see it. If you don't know what this means, you're probably not a geek.).

embed this

if you would like to embed this visualization on your site or blog, feel free to use the html below. hint: you can change the height and width properties to fit your needs. If you do embed the visualization, please cite the source and provide a link back to this URL. Thank you! :)