Death And Taxes | WallStats.com The Art of Information

Death and Taxes: 2010 Released!!!

Posted on 22. Jul, 2009 by Jess.

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Finally! After 2 months of hard work and design, the 2010 version of Death and Taxes is finally released and available to purchase. The page is here, http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ I must say I was very excited to get this project finished because it wasn’t just the same old Bush administration budget this year. This is Obama’s first official [...]

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Death and Taxes 2010 - Data only.

Posted on 16. Jun, 2009 by Jess.

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So the data collection and processing part of the project is finished. I decided to post up the data that I will be using so peope can read it, check it, or do whatever they like. I will pretty much be importing into the poster as is, though I still need to add a bunch [...]

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Question of Design and Data

Posted on 04. Jun, 2009 by Jess.

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First of all, thank you for your input on the previous design/data dilema. I feel confident I made the right choice for Death and Taxes 2010. Now another data/design issue is before you. In the previous dilemma, I had to figure out a way to account for the Stimulus funding since it was inseparable from each budget [...]

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A question of percentages - need input

Posted on 25. May, 2009 by Jess.

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So one of the first issues to arise in creating the Death and Taxes poster for 2010 is that of percentages. Normally, for all the data points I list the Agency/Program name, followed by the dollar amount, then the percentage change from last year. However this year it’s a bit tricky because all of the stimulous [...]

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Open call for advising, Death and Taxes 2010

Posted on 15. May, 2009 by Jess.

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So the Obama’s administration released their full budget numbers last friday through the OMB. This information which is thousands of pages long contains all the spending estimated for the federal goverment for 2010. Usually this data is released the first Monday in February, but due to a new administration and recent economic activity, it has [...]

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Banned from Digg.com

Posted on 19. Jan, 2009 by Jess.

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There has been an update to this situation. Click here or skip down to the end. For the past several months this site, WallStats.com has been banned from Digg.com. I will get to the absurd reason in a moment. If you are not familliar with Digg, it is a social media site where uses submit interesting [...]

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

Posted on 13. Jun, 2008 by Jess.

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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 [...]

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Visualizing One Billion Dollars.

Posted on 30. May, 2008 by Jess.

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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 [...]

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Spread the Word!

Posted on 21. May, 2008 by Jess.

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We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate. ” - Thomas Jefferson The American people are already invested in their government, yet they are clueless or worse, misinformed, about their investment. If people actually knew how their tax dollars were spent, in their name, they [...]

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Death and Taxes, Microsoft, DeepZoom and a beer fridge.

Posted on 16. May, 2008 by Jess.

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So I was invited over to Microsoft’s HQ in Redmond, WA, to talk with Larry Larsen, a Microsoft evangelist about Death and Taxes and the Deep Zoom application of it. Here is the video. It uses SilverLight which is basically Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash. You can get SilverLight here and I highly recommend [...]

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Martha Stewart, Death, and Taxes

Posted on 04. May, 2008 by Jess.

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On April 15th, Tax Day, I, Jess Bachman, appeared on the Martha Stewart Show. It was an odd segment for her show which typically deals with crafts, gardening and cooking. Indeed I was in between Elizabeth Vargas who was cooking prosciutto and peas, and eco-friendly gardening. The experience was great in [...]

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Total military and national security spending in the U.S. federal budget.

Posted on 20. Apr, 2008 by Jess.

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Every year people ask me, “Just what is all this military/national security spending you list?”. Well I have decided to type it all out once and for all. What qualifies spending as ‘military’ or ‘national security’ is subjective. There is strict interpretations which only includes funding with in the Department of [...]