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.

Comments

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.

The Playfair Charts: Scotland ExIm Barchart

Soon after finishing the second Playfair chart, the one on Wheat Price and Wages, I searched the internet for additional charts made by him. I found a Bar chart circa 1786, which showed the Scottish export and import volumes with other countries. For me, the real thrill was to scroll by the list of the name of places long consigned to history books - Jersey Is, Greenland, Prussia, Denmark and Norway (together) and Flanders. First, the original Playfair Barchart from Wikipedia, Then, my version of it in Excel. A couple of parting words: Excel 2007 no longer support dots and lines as fillers for charts. Hence, the ribbed import chart is given a different color, Gold. Normally, I'd use data point labels to construct the chart legends and other declarations given at the bottom of the chart. However, given Excel 2007' inability to automatically re-size labels to fit texts, I was forced to use text-boxes instead.

The Playfair Charts: Wheat Price and Wages

After successfully recreating the Playfair trade-balance time-series chart , I took up the second chart shown in Jorge's post which is fancifully titled, "Chart showing at one view the price of the quarter of wheat and Wages of Labour by the week from The year 1565 to 1821." I left out the top arches. Comparatively, this was the easier chart. Staying true to Jorge' rules, I didn't use any shape or clipart objects in this chart. The big oval shaped object in the middle of the chart, which contains the title is actually a marker for a data point. The original Playfair Wheat price and Wages chart from Wikipedia, and underneath, is my version in Excel.

Somnath's Excel Charts

Search This Blog