Andrew Trice

Friday April 17, 2009

Visualizing Your Taxes With Flex

This morning I stumbled upon this post on flowingdata.com; In the spirit of the recent "tax day" (taxes were due on April 15th), it provides a dataset showing the average of how many days you work for per year, just to pay your taxes. The numbers are averages by state, and now I know that I live in the 5th highest taxed state in the country (in 2009).

From the post:

About 28.2% of the average American's income goes towards taxes, which means the first 103 days of the year is to pay for government. At the end of these 103 days - April 13 - is Tax Freedom Day. However, because of varying state-by-state tax burdens and average incomes, Tax Freedom Day varies by state. Alaska, for example, has the earliest Tax Freedom Day (March 23) because it has low state and local taxes while Connecticut is last on April 30, because of "extraordinarily high federal income taxes."

I took it upon myself to throw together a quick & basic Flex example visualizing this data. It's just a datagrid and a column chart showing the states, and the average number of days worked to pay taxes for each state. You can sort the data by clicking on the column headers in the datagrid, or you can use the horizontal slider (courtesy of flexlib) to filter the range based on the number of days by state. The red chart values are for 2009, and the gray values are from 2008.

Doesn't that make you want to pay more taxes? ;-) At least there seems to be less "government days" in 2009 than there were in 2008.