Down the Rabbit Hole of the Pentagon Graphics Machine.

In my research for the Death and Taxes poster I come across all sorts of charts and graphs.  The are graphics produced by people in the pentagon, a half trillion dollar enterprise.  While some are simple and too the point, others have gone off the deep end of visualization methods.

Next week I will be interviewing someone from the “Engine Room”, which is a initiative started two years ago from the Department of Defenses’ comptrollers office that deals specifically with analyzing budgetary information and briefing creation.  Basically they make charts and graphs from large amounts of information that members of congress and the president can understand.

The Engine Room is a very welcome program for anyone who has seen what Major Generals can do with PowerPoint and some clip-art. But just to put into perspective some of the good work the Engine Room is doing, let us take a trip down the rabbit hole of the pentagon graphics machine.

First I would like to mention that the graphics coming out of each branch of the military are vastly different.  The Army’s are all quite uniform sticking to bar graphs and pie charts and all with a matching color scheme.  The Navy’s graphics are less polished with a focus on line charts and the occasional concept map.  The Air Force however that really goes over the top in their visualization methods, from baffling to well, more baffling, their graphics really show off what can be accomplished when you lose sight of your audience and forget that sometimes the best way to convey information with with a paragraph or two of text.

Let’s start off with the Army.  Here is what 75% of their charts have looked like for the past 5 years.

It’s simple and stright forward.  Their pie graphs are also well done.

Clear and functional with a break out box for those sub %5 items.  Occasional you will get a graph that really didn’t need to be visualized.  This bar graph - table hybrid below shows how unexciting two nearly identical sets of data can be.

The Navy uses a variety of visualization methods with some more effective than others.  Their standard method is the line chart as seen below.

Not very polished, but useful, although a legend could have been included with this one.  Sometimes they will mix in a bar chart as well.

One chart they use a lot is the 3D area chart.

Again not very polished, but effective.

Here is where it get’s a little tricky.  The Navy uses a table to chart the porduction of various planes and ships, except they use a strikeout to denote changes.  It can end up looking a bit like a bowling score card.

Here is a more complex one.

The Navy also dabbles in concept visualization too.  Here is one that looks simpler than it really is.

And here is one that looks as complicated as it really is.

At least there is some production value there, with gradients ansd such.  There was one graph in the Navy documentation that looked like it really did not belong there.  This one below, drawn with MS Paint, was inserted into some paragraph text.

Now on to the Air Force when things really start to get out of hand.  First to prepare you for the craziness of the Air Force documentation, let me show you what a typical document cover looks like.

This one is from a few years ago but it’s really got everything Air Force in there as if there was a requirement to depict all aspects of the branch in clipart form.

The Air Force graphics are not all over-the-top.  Here are a few that have little flare but are none the less, odd.

This one is easy to understand, but at first glance it looks a bit like a graph depicting the flight of boomerang.

Now the lines charts get a bit more complicated.

I am sure there could have been a better way to represent this data than weaving multiple lines together like a sloppily knit scarf.

It get’s worse.

This area chart seems to be crossed with some metaphor visualization methods as well as a magnetic poetry set - Air Force Jargon Edition.  I must note that these image0s are not cropped, if they lack legends, keys, or explinations it is because they were not included.

Occasionally you will see a bar graph in the mix.

Considering that most of this chart is about future projections which are flat, I am not too sure as this really needed to be visualized.

Where the Air Force really goes the extra mile is in the non-traditional methods of data visualization.

This one looks pretty snazzy at first, but I suspect that this image existed indepentantly and the document creator just added labels on top of it.  Does this really tell us anything?

Here is one of the most useful charts I have come across.

It’s simple and shows just what’s involved in the ‘budget’ aspect of the Air Force.  It doesn’t really show how they are in volved, but that may be asking too much.

Not to say there isn’t an attempt to convery complex themes and information…

…there is.  The above chart may not make a lot of sense to the layman, or even the any-man, but to the creator of the chart it means something.  Perhaps the chart is an accurate depiction of a very complex organizational strategy.  Or the chart depcits something of less complexity in an obfuscating way.  Or the chart depicts something that doesn’t need to be depicted.  I can’t say for certain, but its totally baffling to me.

It doesn’t have to be complex to be confusing.

This looks like it should be straight forward.  But is the diagonal line on some type of axis?  Just what is going on here?  Even with all the acronyms explained, I suspect this chart is still confusing.

Here is one that looks promising.

We have a quadrant overlapped with some area data.  What I don’t quite understand is if this is a concept driven chart, is there any data to support it.  Usually quadrant charts involve axises.  Here there are not axises making the shapes and sizes oi the various items rather arbitrary.

Here is another one that looks simple, but the arrows seem to raise more questions then provide answers.

It certainly doesn’t help that it’s titled, “Air Force Budget Quadrants” when there are no quadrants, unless I am missing something.

This one may look really busy, and it is, but there is plenty of information in there without being overly confusing.

The key could use some help deciphering the red, blue, and aqua colored radar coverage though.

There is a particular document that uses mostly PowerPoint created charts, and it can get a little out of control.

What is generally lacking in these charts is some uniformity.  Providing a clear path will help the reader absorb the information.  Generally these particulary graphs are chock full of bits of clip art and different colored boxes and arrows.  It really obstructs the informational aspect.

Occasionally, it literally obstructs the chart, like this one where a plan wing is covering the graph.  Don’t ask why, this is a half trillion dollar operation here.

This ‘chart’ looks like a fun time.

But is it telling us anything?

And just who is doing these graphics anyways?

Are these informational?

Or is it just fun and games?

I won’t rant about how our tax dollars pay for these images and how we deserve better.  But What I do find a bit alarming is that these documents are used to breif major decision makers.  These decision makers may know a thing or two about policy and politics, but if decoding and understanding the armed forces budget is the goal of these documents, then there is a huge failure here.

Not only are these graphs of limited use and poor quality, but they are terribly inconsistant across the branches.  Is the Air Force’s budget any more difficult to understand than the Army’s?  Only the largest of corporations deal with budgets this big; over a  hundred billions dollars annually.  You can only imagine the quality and caliber of the charts and graphics comming out of their reports which themselvs cost millions to produce.  Why does the Department of Defense, which is an economy the size of Turkey, put out such inconsistant and poor visualizations?

Well fortunately there is an effort to improve this front.  As I mentioned earlier, the Department of Defense Comptroller, Tina Jones has started an effort call the Engine Room which is quickly turning militarty budget reports into a standardized art form.  Next week we will be interviewing a member of their team to try to get some answers to these questions and learn about their process.  Stay tuned to the feed.

Down the Rabbit Hole of the Pentagon Graphics Machine. has one response Add your thoughts.

What’s in a name? Children of the Collective Consciousness.

You may have unwittingly named your child after a meme in the fabric of society.  Or you yourself may be nothing more than the product of hive minded parents.

So what’s in a name?

I have always been interested in naming things, it’s one of the reasons why I own so many unused domain names.  And the naming of ones child is most likely the most important act of naming a person will encounter, so it always peaks my interest to find out why a particular name hold true to a set of parents.

After coming across a very cool set of visualization tools from Nametrends.net which pulls data sets the Social Securtity Administration, my curiosity got the best of me.  Particularly because my wife and I only last year named our son, Forest.

The data shows that the name Forest is not popular at all, about 1 in 10,000, however the double ‘r’ variant, Forrest, is 10 times as common.  Interestingly enough, both variants had a noticeable peak in the last 80 years, 1994.  The same year Forrest Gump debuted and won 6 Oscars.  Surely a correlation.  We passed on the second ‘r’ in Forrest for precisely this reason, in case our son Forest is ridiculed by future bullies (think “run Forrest run!), he can at least he can get off on a technicality.

But with such a well presented set of data (love the sparklines!), I had to go further and there were many surprises as well as mysteries.  Did you know that ‘Isabella’ was the second most popular name for girls last year?  Or than for boys, Logan is more popular than John, Jack, or Robert?  Or than since 1987, more boys have been named ‘Angel’ than girls.  There are more baby boys named Angel last year than Kevin or Justin.  Good thing we didn’t consult baby name books, or else we could have ended up with an Angel too, the #1 name for boys in Arizona, #2 in Nevada, #3 in California, #5 in Texas.  In 18 years time there will be an army of Angels register to vote in the Southwest.  Politicians and marketers take note.

But for me, the real mystery is why have there been such surges in the frequency of certain names.  ‘Angel’ has been around for over a century and on the rise since the early 1990’s, perhaps coinciding with the popular CBS series, Touched by an Angel, although this doesn’t explain the rise in use of the name for boys while for girls it has fallen since 2001.

Some names have increased in frequency several thousand percent over the course of a decade, some as much as 50% in one year alone.  Below are some visuals that show the sudden concentration and expansion of a ‘vogue name’.  The darker the state, for greater frequency the name.

First lets look at my own name, Jesse.  My birth certificate says ‘Jess’ but the sans ‘e’ variant hasn’t been in vogue for over a hundred years, so I used the more common ‘Jesse’.

Jesse

As you can see, my namesake is popular during the 70’s and 80’s and then seems to fall out of favor in the past decade.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps a lack of Jesse role models or famous Jesse’s in general.  The peak for my namesake was in 1981.  Perhaps it was because former Minnesota governor and then wrestler Jesse Ventura won the World Tag Team Championship a year prior.  That is a bit of a stretch, but the previous peak was a hundred years prior in 1882, the same year Jesse James was assassinated by the coward Robert Ford.  Am I off base in making the connection?

Ok, over to more modern namesakes.  The girls name ‘Ava’.  You may know a few, its the fourth most popular name last year and up 4,441% in the past decade.  Ava has always hovered in the 1 in 5,000 range but recently it’s almost 1 in 100.  As you can see below, its not even on the radar until the explosion in the past few years.

Ava

With no notable Avas to speak of, I cannot explain the rise in this collective mind set.  Anyone care to offer en explanation?

Other name explosions are easier to correlate.  The name ‘Naveah’ which is ‘Heaven’ backwards did not exist before 2000.  It was then that P.O.D singer Sonny Sandoval gave the moniker to his daughter who was featured on the show MTV Cribs.  Like some ticking time bomb of the zeitgeist, Naveah rocketed up the list to #31 on last years’ most popular name for girls, above Julia, Jessica, and Katherine.  Bear witness to the power of a Christian metal rockstar’s power to influence 1 out of every 300 parents in the US.

Nevaeh

It doesn’t take a clever backwordification to create a naming sensation however.  Here are two more names with no cultural origin that have really come out of nowhere.

Aiden for boys.

And Addison for girls.

They rank 31 and 11 respectively on last years list.  Addison did not exist as a girls name before 1994, even though the male version has been around for a century.  Sudden rises like these baffle me, anyone care to take a shot at their origins?

If a some babies name are indeed fads then it would stand to believe that they would fall out of favor rather quickly.  One good example is the name Brittany.  In 1979 you had a 2,178 chance of being born a Brittany.  Ten years later and every 50th girl was a Brittany.  Now we are back to 1979 levels.  Did the saturation of Brittany’s reach such concentrated levels in 1979 that the peoples inner iconoclasm unleash backlash of better judgment?  See for your self.

Brittany.

It’s also interesting to note that the single ‘t’ variant, Britany, is much less common, in fact it’s barely on the radar, despite Ms Spears best efforts.

If most of the recent extremely popular names can’t be traced back to popular figures then what causes their rise?  Perhaps I am mistaken in thinking that famous people are even a factor.  Maybe there is some underlying driving force that germinates a particular name in the heads of parents, and the correlation with celebrities is only a coincidence.  I would love to hear some alternate theories.

But first let me present the ‘Dwight’ case.  It’s hardly a popular name these days, and even it’s glory days it was never more than 1 in 1,000.  Yet there are definitive peaks.  So I took the most famous Dwight of our era, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and matched up his popularity with that his name.  You can be the judge on whether there is a true correlation or not.

Now one final case is that of ‘Billy’.  I tried to think of a southern name to see if there were names prevalent in only certain parts of the country.  I knew this was the case but all the names in the top 100 each year are spread through the country.  At one point, back in 1934, 1 in 100 kids were Billy, not Bill or William, but Billy.  As you can see below, Billy rarely makes an appearance out side of the Bible belt.

Billy

So there is a geographical correlation as well as a possible celebrity correlation, and some overlap as well.  But what else is there?  What effects the minds of parents, practically simulataneously, creating a two-fold increase in the frequency of some names in only a years time?  It’s interesting to ponder for sure.

p.s. Another interesting factoid is that since 1880 the greatest frequency of names is a tie between John and William, who in 1880 were both 1 in 12 of newborn population.  The current most Frequent is Jacob who numbers 1 in 90.  No doubt the further back we go, beyond 1880, the greater concentration but I have yet to find data for that.

I’m still looking though.

What’s in a name? Children of the Collective Consciousness. has 7 responses Add your thoughts.

U.S. Troop Stength in Iraq, and other data.

So I was researching the U.S. troops strength in Iraq since there was all this talk of surging and pulling out.  Turns out there isn’t really any good visuals of it, and the raw data leaves alot to be desired.  So I went about creating my own chart.

I would first like to thank the Statistical Information Analysis Division(SIAD) of the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the raw data.  As is often the case when the Pentagon and the Internet mingle, the SIAD website looks like it was done by the lone DOD IT guy in between bites of a chicken sandwich

Regardless, here is the data when its cleaned up a bit. (click it to make it bigger)

I have added in major dates related to the Iraq war.  The Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force are depicted and labeled.  If you see any trends let me know; I am not analyzing this data, just throwing it out there.

For reasons unknown to me, the SIAD does not list troop levels later than December of 2007.  The unofficial end of July projection is 140,000 and the unofficial goal expressed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates for December is 100,000.  I will leave the plausibility of that up to you.  Whats also missing in the numbers for Operation Enduring Freedom which is for Afghanistan.  The data is available for this but not prior to 2005 for some reason so I didn’t include it.  There are 20-25,000 troops in Afghanistan at any given time, about 95% Army.

So now that we have a nice clean chart, its time to complicate it with extraneous data sets.  Below is the same chart only I overlaid the Dow Jones Index, Halliburtons stock aswell as the Homeland Security’s terror alert indication.  See any correlation?

Of course there is no set vertical scale for the economic data but there doesn’t need to be to spot trends.  I experiment with other indicators such as the price of oil but the chart became a little overwhelming.  I will try more overlays in the future and you’re more than welcome to use the images to your own devices.

Enjoy.

U.S. Troop Stength in Iraq, and other data. has 2 responses Add your thoughts.

Bush’s new Alternative Energy is powered by smoke and mirrors.

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001, we have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable alternative energy sources — and we are on the threshold of incredible advances.

So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative — a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research — at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthroughs in two vital areas. To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants, revolutionary solar and wind technologies, and clean, safe nuclear energy.

(Applause.)

Huzzah! The administration finally (2006) acknowledges that we need to do something about this oil habit.  Clean energy here we come!

Of course the State of the Union address is like the worlds fair of spin and political cover.  A time to take note of all your achievements however slight and fleeting and spin them up into a whirling tornado of progress.  The more out-of-context your point is, the more magical it becomes.  And don’t worry, Congress will duly applaud and cheer as if they were auditioning for the role of the laugh track on Save By The Bell.

Two years ago Bush acknowledged your addiction to oil.  Last year here echoed his commitment to altenative energy.

“It’s in our vital interest to diversify America’s energy supply — the way forward is through technology. We must continue changing the way America generates electric power, by even greater use of clean coal technology, solar and wind energy, and clean, safe nuclear power.”

(Applause.)

The 2008 State of the Union address called for more the same, “increase the use of renewable power” and “a new generation of clean energy technology”. It looks like greener pastures are ahead.

Two weeks later the Bush administration released its proposed budget for 2009.  This is where the Death and Taxes poster comes in.  Words are easier to spin than numbers. Ok numbers are just as easy to spin.  But the data doesn’t lie.  The President’s budget and the Death and Taxes poster give a more accurate look at our priorities.

Here is an overview of the Department of Energy as imaged in the poster.

So lets examine further.

First of all, Energy Efficiency and Renewables is being cut by 27%.  Energy Conservation which provides the most benefit per dollar invested is cut 25%.  Solar, which has a potential output of 22-69% of the total US power gets shelved as does Hydrogen.  Does anyone remember that much touted photo op of President Bush filling up a Hydrogen car in California?  It was his magic bullet to make us all forget about pesky fuel efficiency.  Well that experiment didn’t last long.  In fact the only alternative energy that the administration is actually pushing (when the spot light isn’t on) is biomass, or more precisely, corn based ethanol.  Which is unfortunate since ethanol fuel is a disaster in the making.

Are you on the ethanol bandwagon? Well consider this; If we distilled every corn plant in the US, it would only displace 1/6 of our gasoline consumption.  A box of Corn Flakes would then cost hundreds of dollars.  To replace all of our gasoline we would need to plant 71% of our farmland with fuel crops.  The more ethanol, the less food. Not very viable.  It’s also inefficient to produce (costs 7 barrels of oil to make 8 barrels of ethanol), reduces millage per gallon (thanks to the high octane), produces more smog than oil, and would strain water supplies.

Bush keeps pushing it with tax incentives and handouts thanks to the Corn Lobby and the fact that its a useful distraction from other effective methods of reducing gasoline use, like increasing mileage standards.

Ok so if renewable energy isn’t in the budget, then what is?

The largest upswing in funding comes from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).  This a large 727 million barrel capacity store of petroleum reserves housed in salt domes along the Gulf of Mexico.  It’s almost full too, you can check the capacity here.  There is enough oil in there to run the country for a month, should there be a world wide embargo as well as disruption of all domestic oil production facilities.

Fossil Energy R&D is on the rise too, mainly a result of Bush’s “clean coal” initiatives.  When large energy companies announce with great fanfare they were are spending billions of dollars funding “alternative energy”, they are not talking about wind and solar.  They are talking about synthetic gas, liquidfied natural gas, and clean coal.  As if burning coal could be a “clean” process, proponents are hoping to just bury all the toxic emissions in the ground.  Coal is responsible for 48% of our power supply and U.S reserves could last 250 years, so when the coal lobby outspends the solar lobby 25 to 1, their voice is heard in the White House.

But you probably thought the Department of Energy was in the energy business.

They are actually in the nuclear weapons business as a majority of the departments funding is used to maintain our nuclear stock pile and turning old nukes into glass.  A new MOX Fuel facility is in the works at just under a half billion dollars.  This place will make uranium and plutonium cocktails to power nuclear plants around the U.S.  With 19% of the power supply, the Nuclear Lobby has some serious clout.

So when the microphones are turned off, and the number crunchers take over, the federal budget becomes the ultimate insight into our national priorities.  The next time you hear a politician talk about funding alternative energy and being addicted to oil, check the numbers, because usually their green tinted glasses are paid for by lobbyists.

(applause)

Bush’s new Alternative Energy is powered by smoke and mirrors. has one response Add your thoughts.

Visualizing One Billion Dollars.

The Death and Taxes poster contains a lot of information and is great for putting federal spending in context.  However, the de-facto unit of measure is one billion dollars.  I realized that people often have a hard time grasping just what one billion dollars is.  So to provide further context to the poster, I am putting one billion dollars into perspective.

There have been other attempts around the web to imagine what a billion dollars might be, but they tend to obfuscate the problem further.  You can go here and learn that one billion credit cards weighs as much as 78 brachiosauruses or that one billion dollars in pennies would cover 14 square miles, but does that all really mean anything?

Let’s investigate what one billion dollars is and how it relates to us and our world.

Now most people will never see $1 billion themselves.  If you live in the United States, there is a 1 in 800,000 chance that you’re a billionaire, which are about the same odds as winning half a million dollars playing Powerball.  So ingenuity, hard work, and inheritance will net you a better rate of return than the lottery, but for those of us without such gifts, one billion dollars is only attainable when working in groups.

If you have a PH.D. then you already have a leg up on everyone else.  Just gather together 278 of your doctorate friends and add up all the money all of you make during the 40 or so years of your career and presto!, One billion dollars.

Of course if you don’t have a PH.D and consider yourself just an ‘average’ guy, you will have to work a little harder, a little longer, or instead, just round up an additional 312 of your ‘average’ guy friends.

If you’re female you will need another 178 doses of girl power to reach one billion dollars over the course of your collective lifetimes.

If you consider yourself black or African-American you will need almost twice the man/woman power to reach a billion.  An additional 656 lifetime contributions will do the trick.

Of course if you are in the unfortunate position of living below the poverty line, it will take an entire regiment of your unfortunate brethren to come up with one billion dollars in a lifetime.

In reality, the federal budget is an annual process, so understanding a billion dollars in terms of lifetime incomes is only of moderate use.  To bring it down to the annual level, you are going to need a lot of friends.  This is assuming you and your friends represent the mean American.  That’s mathematical mean.  I’d imagine an unearthly level of charm is required to achieve this number of friends.

When relating to federal spending, we ultimately have to relate to taxes.  So here is the amount of people required to support one billion dollars in federal spending.    To put it another way, the taxes paid by everyone living in New York City is almost half of the annual cost of the war in Iraq.  You would have to tax everyone in L.A., Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Detroit to come up with the rest.  Again, this is assuming everyone in New York is an ‘average’ American, which is certainly not the case considering 40 of the aforementioned billionaires live there.  But you get the idea.

Before we get too far along on a socioeconomic tangent, lets switch gears.  If you happen to be so lucky as to win the Powerball lottery jackpot, odds being 1 in 146 million, then you are well on your way to being a billionaire.  Now all you have to do is win the jackpot every time for the whole year.  Impossible?  Surely not, why the odds are only 1 in 8 septendecillion.  That’s 55 digits.  If you are a string theorist, you might find those odds attractive.

Now that you are the luckiest person ever to live, what are you going to do with your winnings?  Blow it on something totally ridiculous of course.  That’s right, with your one billion dollar bank account you could purchase every action figure in sold in the US for a year.  Or all the video games for a few weeks.  I think we know that a year long reign as Lord of the Plastic Figurine to be the awesomer option.

Now forget that pipe dream! We are relating to government spending here and the gov’ment ain’t got time fer toys.  Instead of a nations’ worth of plastic superheros, one billion dollars can buy you half a plane.  Now, if we are talking strict off-the-line unit cost, then you could fly away in a B-2 with $250 million in cash stuffed in the weapons bay.  But you would first have to find someone to foot the R&D costs for you, which isn’t likely.  So $2.2 Billion is the total get-my-money’s-worth price for a B-2.  A bit out of reach for a lowly one billionaire.

The black market is where the action for the warlord on a budget.  Especially in Africa where a slightly used AK-47 will cost you 1/4 the price it would if it were bought in the Middle East; around $200.  One billion dollars could corner the entire black market for firearms.  You would need substantially more if you wanted to do it legally, providing the U.S. alone with $1.2 billion.  We are talking small arms here — machine guns, pistols, rifles, grenades, etc, which is only about 20% of the total international arms trade.  Even still, there is plenty of guns to go around, approximately one for every man, woman, and child in North America.  If you include military small arms, we will have to arm up South America as well.

Edit: I tried for about 45 minutes to think of a clever segue from fire arms to breakfast cereal but failed.  If you think of one let me know and I will credit you.

If you bought up all the stock you would enjoy the benefits of General Mill’s one billion dollars in profits.  That’s a lot of Boo Berry.  Yes, to further put the figure into perspective, this food giant, whose cereal you have grown up, with can put together one billion dollars worth of profit on $11 billion in sales.  This would place them somewhere around 200 on the Fortune 500 and 250 on the global Forbes 2000 lists.

Breakfast peddlers can’t hold a candle to the sheer monetary force of international war-making.  The entire yearly profit of a sprawling Fortune 500 company could be absorbed over a weekend in Iraq.  The war in Iraq is the first war in which we have had to borrow money from foreigners since that Revolutionary one we fought 225 years ago.  Back then the movies cost a nickle and a war was only $15 million.  Even adjusted for inflation and its not more than a week’s worth of Iraq’s expenses.  In fact, as you read this post, it’s costing $6,024 per second to wage war over there.

Two days in Iraq, annual income of 25 thousand people, a years worth of lotto winnings, its all one billion dollars.  I hope the preceding images have put that dollar amount into some perspective and that the information in the Death and Taxes poster is of a bit more use.  The National Cancer Institute receives $5 billion per year; that’s 10 days in Iraq, the cost of two and a half B-2’s, the tax revenue from half a million people,  every lotto jackpot for five years, etc.

To really understand federal spending, we need to put the information in to a larger context.  That is what the poster if for.  To relate federal spending to ourselves, we need to bring this large numbers down to eye level.  Hopefully, the next time you hear that the government spent ABC billion on XYZ you will think, “That’s a lot of action figures!”

Source: People. Guns. Toys. Lotto. Planes. War. Boo Berry.

This blog and website is supported by sales of the Death and Taxes poster. Please consider supporting this project by buying one or two of the really cool posters which are all new for 2009!

Visualizing One Billion Dollars. has 11 responses Add your thoughts.