Skip to main content

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.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please do not post spam or promote your own site(s). Comments are moderated and such comments will not be published.

Also, please keep your comment relevant to the topic of the article.

Finally, please do not post any of your personally identifiable information such as phone number, email address or other important details as this is an open platform.

Popular posts from this blog

The Cricket Graphs: The Forgotten Chart

The fun of receiving feedback to blog posts is that one isn't quite sure what they might come up against. While mostly it provides fascinating discussions, insightful comments or explanatory questions, there is also the odd occasion when it throws up unusual requests. The other day I received an email in response to my post, The Cricket Graphs . The sender wanted me to create a "Partnership" chart, which would show the runs scored by the pair of batsmen for every wicket and the balls faced. I went searching for data on the Cricinfo website , and picked out the 3rd ODI  between the South African and Australian cricket teams which was played out in Kingsmead, Durban on October 28, 2011. The Partnership details were taken from the page titled Partnerships Table and the total balls faced by individual batsmen from the Scorecard. Constructing the graphs was a somewhat tricky affair, with two potential bar charts in two axes representing Balls and Runs, which had me w...
1 comment
Read more

Florence Nightingale Circumplex Chart

I was taken to the  Florence Nightingale's Wiki page   during a recent research, and one of the interesting things I noted was her contribution to statistics. It came to me as a pleasant surprise that she is credited with inventing the polar area diagram , or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, which is equivalent to a modern circular histogram. Following the completion of my project and in my weekend to spare, I devoted time to recreating the chart in Excel. It took a combination of Doughnut-Pie-and XY charts and close to four hours to finish it. The colours are a bit darker, the values are approximate and the labels differently oriented, yet the chart looks fairly close to the original as is shown by the picture below.
2 comments
Read more

US Open Tennis

Charting a sporting event is always great fun. More so, if that happens to be the vibrant US Open Tennis Championships which I came across in this piece . But to me, it appeared somewhat wayward and lacking purpose. Most of its charts could have been more efficiently represented through a table, and the only one which made some sense, or added some value was the one that depicted the US women’s singles champion by country over time (1900 - 2011). I decided to approach this from a different perspective. Firstly, I separated the amateur years from the Open era which began in 1968. From 1881-1911, the US Open used a challenge system whereby the defending champion automatically qualified for the next year's final, creating in the bargain, some unbelievable feats like Richard Sears remaining undefeated in the tournament and winning the inaugural seven editions of the Championships. Furthermore, the difficulty in travelling to and from the USA in the earlier years can also be attri...
Post a Comment
Read more