In my posts last summer about understanding the federal budget and the truth about taxes, I pointed to Jess Bachman’s Death and Taxes poster. This monster 24-inch by 36-inch graph shows you just how the government spends your tax money.
From the site:
“Death and Taxes” is a large representational graph and poster of the federal budget. It contains over 500 programs and departments and almost every program that receives over 200 million dollars annually. The data is straight from the president’s 2011 budget request and will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress to begin the fiscal year. All of the item circles are proportional in size to their funding levels for visual comparison and the percentage change from both 2010 and 2001 is included so you can spot trends.
The Death and Taxes poster costs $24, but Bachman has is offering a “buy-one, get-one-free” special for GRS readers. If you use the code slowly at checkout, you can pick up two posters for the price of one (so they’re twelve bucks a piece).
Last year, Bachman sent me a copy of the 2010 poster, and I can attest that it’s a stats-geek’s dream. It’s not art — you won’t want to hang this in your living room — but if you’re curious about government spending, this poster is a keen tool.
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re: “It’s not art”:
Actually, I think the design is quite beautiful. If I had an appropriate space, I would certainly put this on the wall! It’s got a great sense of movement, like a fractal pattern.
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eeee! I SO WANT ONE. Maybe two…
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Gotta love that government!
But seriously, good job on the poster. I’d buy it if I didn’t just pay $980 in taxes last week.
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63% on military/security.
Egad!
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I wish they did this for England.
Does anyone know if this exists in England or UK?
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63% Defense, well without defense we are not here, that is one of the few things the federal government should be spending money on, that it is $895 Billion, thats something to argue. The states, counties, and towns should be doing more, and the federal government should be doing less. Why am I being taxed by four levels for the same thing? The federal government is to unify the states, then the state run themself,
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It would be even more awesome if someone had edited the poster. There are two typos just in the “How to read the data” section: there’s no apostrophe in “its” and the second percentage refers to 2010, not 2001.
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I have this on my cube wall at my goverment office, and people love it. Highly recommended.
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@Rich #7,
You’re right about the apostrophe, but I believe the 2001 date is correct. The second %value is describing the change over the entire decade from 2001-2011. If they can’t find the 2001 budget, they can’t calculate this %.
I love this graph. Although I understand the need for a defense budget, I think our country as a whole would be stronger and more secure if we emphasized strength from within. Strength of an educated populace, a strong research and development sector, safe, clean & reliable energy sources and localized programs that enable our people to better their own lives. I’d love to see our priorities shift in these directions.
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Also it’s proportionate, not porportionate.
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I think it’s a very cool poster, in that it may foster more relevant discussion on what we spend our tax dollars on. HAve to pass on getting one right now as I just bought got a big poster of the evolutionary “tree”.
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I dislike that this poster only shows discretionary spending. Without including entitlements in the picture, you can’t really have an accurate understanding of government spending.
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Thanks for the comements, i Will get the typos fixed before it goes to print on Monday. And the entitlements are depicted in the bottom right corner.
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@Dave I agree we need some but…! That much!
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Prediction: Draw a big circle for healthcare…..and bailouts.
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I don’t know. This is one of my pet peeves – concentrating on the discretionary budget of the federal government as if this is actually representative of government spending. I hear people say things like “63% of the budget is spent on defense!” all the time and it’s just not true. Defense is big, but Social Security and Medicare are far bigger and, if you include state and local government spending which spends trivial amounts of money on defense, but large amounts of money on education, Medicaid, and other social programs, you get a much better idea of exactly where government dollars go.
I’m not trying to make a political point here. It’s certainly reasonable to argue that we spend too much money on defense, but posters like this one are designed to push a particular political agenda and are lying to accomplish it. (And, yes, I read their reasons why they didn’t include Social Security and Medicare and I am unconvinced.)
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I now see that backliteyes made the same point. Hopefully I added something with my comment.
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This link details where money actually goes. First is education, then health care, then pensions, then defense, and finally welfare and interest. (If the left has an out-of-touch with reality belief that the U.S. spends most of its government dollars on defense, don’t get me started on the members of the right I meet who insist that we spend a fortune on foreign aid, a truly trivial amount of government spending.)
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I have to agree with Andrew Stevens on the slant of this representation. Any graphic designer who has read Edward Tufte understands multiple points. First, English speaking peoples traverse information left to right and top to bottom. Placing the total budget at lower right obfuscates. Second proportion matters when working with visual presentation. If the total budget is roughly 3X the discretionary budget, it should be represented visually as such. The rationalization provided is indicative of either an agenda or lack of creativity. Is there really no detail to say about 2/3rds of the annual budget being transfer payments?
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Apparently this blog simply removes html tags in comments. My link was simply to Wikipedia’s page “Government spending” under section 1) United States which aggregates all federal, state, and local spending.
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@Andrew Stevens (#20)
I don’t remove HTML tags in comments. Here’s an example. If the HTML is missing, it’s because you made a typo, not because I’m censoring you.
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Well, I never thought a human did it. (Why on earth would anyone leave the comment, but remove the link? Makes no sense.)
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