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Herman Cain's 9-9-9 Plan

The name Herman Cain came up a few times in my reading materials recently. A former business executive, he is in the news as the leading Republican presidential candidate in the primaries, and for his 9-9-9 Tax Plan.

Kaiser, of Junk Charts has made a couple of attempts to visualize the 9-9-9 Tax Plan and its possible impact on people belonging to different cash income quintiles. One can read and learn about his first attempt here. In all fairness, the chart appears somewhat mangled and hence lacks clarity and the utility for the purpose.

At first glance, the lines looked far too thick and the labels were wrongly positioned. But the most critical omission is missing out on 6.2% of the lowest quintile population who remains undisturbed in this tax shake-up.

The data table is available here. I decided to keep the vertical and horizontal axes similar. The horizontal axis labels are brought down below and major gridlines are formatted to create quintile panels every 20 percentage points. The chart lines, which were plotted overlapping each other in the original chart were plotted within their respective quintile panel to render legibility. Finally, labels were placed to mention the increase/decrease of tax for the percentage of people in the quintile.

The new chart clearly shows the answer to "How Tax hike will affect different income groups"? - The higher the income, the greater is the tax relief for a larger number of people.


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