Data Visualization: Making Taxes Fun

How often can you say that taxes are fun? Not often unless you get a hefty return each year. However, the folks over at Eyebeam decided to make the ominous day in mid-April a bit more fun. They launched the ‘Visualize your Taxes’ challenge and many, many people applied. As a company that specializes in database development design and advanced data visualization, we found this to be fascinating. Here are some pictures of the winning entries:

Where Did My Tax Dollars Go?  Let’s say for the sake of fun I make $80,000 a year. Using fun data visualization design, here is a breakdown of where the money goes:

This one allows you to select the different pie pieces and get the dollar breakdown of where your taxes went. This visualization is cool; I was blown away by how much we spend on healthcare and national defense and not on Education and the like. However, I was not super blown away by the representation of data. While pie charts are great, they are not super innovative.

Finalists & Honorable Mentions

Here are some of the other finalists who conducted more innovative visualizations of taxes:

Budget Climb is REALLY cool and nerdy, and takes interactive data visualization to a new level. They created this using openFrameworks (an open source C++ toolkit) and the Microsoft® Kinect®, leveraging the recently released Kinect SDK. Here’s what they had to say about the custom software application:

“Budget Climb is a physically interactive data environment where we can explore 26 years of federal spending – giving us a uniqueperspective on how our government spends our money. In order to explore the data we must exert physical effort, revealing how the budget is distributed in a novel and tangible way.”

Here is a picture of Budget Climb, but we encourage you to visit their site and check out the video because the picture does not do it justice. Not only is this a cool example of data visualization and interaction, it is a testament to the power of the Kinect platform. We are looking forward to playing around with the SDK ourselves and seeing what kind of custom application development ideas we can come up with.

Online School’s version of tax visualization is a little different. They ask you to enter the amount that you make, and then rank your budget priorities from 1-10 (e.g. Education, Debt, Social Services, Health) and based on your priorities, it shows you how well it aligns with the actual 2010 US Budget. I got a 42% match based on my priorities. While the tool gave me a slightly depressing outcome (Apparently I don’t pay for my priorities), this model could be great for aligning priorities in a business situation.

Can I Get a Receipt with That? may be my favorite data visualization project of all of them because it shows taxes in an innovative and relatable way. You enter your income and it gives you a receipt-style breakdown of where your money went. However, the coolest feature is that can convert that amount into other things like Chipotle burritos or cans of Redbull. Those are numbers we can relate to. Check them out to find out how many cups of Starbucks coffee you pay to the government.

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Database design, development and visualization are some of the many services that Amadeus Consulting conducts for our clients. Learn more about our unique approach to custom software development.