Visualizing Tax Freedom Day
Posted April 18th, 2009 by annieOver at FlowingData is a Visualize This challenge to visualize Tax Freedom Day (the number of days that your taxes take out of your yearly income). The national average is 103 days out of the 365, or April 13th. The average varies from state to state and the task is to represent these state statistics.
My first inclination was to incorporate a map, with possibly a topographic-type extrusion of each state for the length of time. But in order to do that really well, it would take some interactive 3D navigation…and I haven’t touched Processing in a long time. Or Flash for that matter.
Next I thought about some kind of chart, so I played around with YUI charts. Nothing I came up with was very compelling though, so I decided to approach it from the calendar view. I ended up with this HTML/JS visualization: Tax Freedom Dates & States.
It seems to me that people will want to browse by state or browse chronologically, so here you can get the states from hovering over a (green) date in the calendar view or get the date by hovering over a state. The national average (April 13th) is represented by a brighter green date. I thought about incorporating color gradations, but I like the simplicity of one color for tax days. Also, I made it from scratch with the goal just to make it work, so it could probably be more efficient.
