ED:Robert is a guest writer for SCS
I love big charts and graphs, and thebudgetgraph.com’s representation of where Congress allocates your tax dollars. The flash/preview of this poster is a little clunky but the only critique I’d levy at the poster is the way it handles micro versus macro comprisons. There’s a stat in the middle of the chart stating that 66% of the discrestionary funding goes to military and national security, while 33% goes to non-military programs (I didn’t realize military spending was that high!).
Spending is graphically indicated by the relative size of the bubbles, while this proves effective for comparisons within small regions of the chart, it makes it diffcult to translate across space. For example, our 66%/33% difference in military spending isn’t plainly obvious by simply glacing at the chart. In fact, one might think that the division was equal because military and non-military categories occupy the same amount of space on the poster (50/50). It would have been nice is the chart designers had made that division of spending visually forceful.
Post a Comment