The first of series of infographics I am designing to illustrate the average federal tax rate applied to different salaries. I want to show how the marginal income tax rates + social security and medicare taxes combine together for a single taxpayer up to $400,000. (This graphic does not include payroll taxes paid by the employer.)

A little background about this data. If you take a look at your W-2 form you can see that there are 3 different taxes applied to salaries and wages:

The income tax graph is created from the 2009 tax schedule for a single taxpayer:

which you can find from the IRS Tax Tables here while the information about the social security and medicare tax can be found here.

From Australia’s future tax system

Graph show the % of GDP collected in taxes.

From Australia’s future tax system

Transfers and taxes by level of income for a single income family, two children aged 3 and 8 (2008?09) The area on the top half of the graph is the money transfered to the family while the bottom half shows the taxes paid by the family.

From Tax Policy Center

Since in the 1970s and early 80s, property taxes become a less important source of state revenue while charges (fees, licenses) became more important.

From Economix blog

The different sources of revenue for the federal government from 1934 to 2015. (2010-2015 are projections)

From Heritage Foundation

They have graphed the top tax rate for corporations with amount of corporate taxes collected as percent of GDP (since 1960)

From Tax Policy Center

Here is the corporate income tax as the percent of Federal Taxes collected (since 1950)

From USA Today

There is a lot going on in this interactive graphic:

• The main graph is plotting a single salary (in gray) but it is shown adjusted for inflation from 1940 to 2008.
• The colored areas represent the amount of tax appropriated each year to different parts of the federal budget.
• The smaller graph shows the percent of income paid in federal taxes from 1940 to 2008

I have taken screenshots for three different incomes for comparison: $10,000 $100,000 and $1,000,000. You will notice that the percentage of the tax collected for Social Security is greater for the $10,000 income than for the two higher incomes. This is because the % of taxes collected from the Social Security tax is highest on the $10,000 income.

$10,000

$100,000

$1,000,000

I think the visual display of the data is very effective however the rollover text annotations are not effective since you can’t use them to follow the underlining story in the data visualization.

While I appreciate Google Finance integrating the news story with the graphic which allows you to use the data visualization find related news stories you lose the different data series and there still is no coherent story for the graphic.

Still, I have found the most effective storytelling using data visualizations uses a person to narrate the story.

Transparency: Currency: The Sinking Dollar, originally uploaded by GOOD Magazine.

Found via GOOD Magazine’s Infographics Now Archived on Flickr | FlowingData