The Recursive Muffin

Nov 28
I’m down with the Occupy movement, but this is atrocious.
Over the years, I’ve seen many charts cooking the Federal Budget one way or the other.  A common dodge is to count debt service as an item without mentioning what the debt spending was earmarked for.  Another is to count veteran’s benefits as non-military.
But this is worse.
This chart represents numbers as the lengths of sides of squares, one of the most blatant visual-stats fallacies possible.  Thus it manages to portray the (attributed) 59% military budget as being 870 times larger than our (attributed) agricultural budget, when in fact it is a mere 30 times larger.  And so forth.
Oh my god.
I love occupy, but people, mind your fucking manners.
thenewrepublic

I’m down with the Occupy movement, but this is atrocious.

Over the years, I’ve seen many charts cooking the Federal Budget one way or the other.  A common dodge is to count debt service as an item without mentioning what the debt spending was earmarked for.  Another is to count veteran’s benefits as non-military.

But this is worse.

This chart represents numbers as the lengths of sides of squares, one of the most blatant visual-stats fallacies possible.  Thus it manages to portray the (attributed) 59% military budget as being 870 times larger than our (attributed) agricultural budget, when in fact it is a mere 30 times larger.  And so forth.

Oh my god.

I love occupy, but people, mind your fucking manners.

thenewrepublic

(via ilovecharts)


  1. puppiesandsushi reblogged this from peasheartssmiles
  2. colledge reblogged this from raspy-silk
  3. history-and-stuff reblogged this from fishingboatproceeds
  4. distionabo reblogged this from think-progress
  5. themunchkym reblogged this from fishingboatproceeds
  6. irreverentscrum reblogged this from jasoncliffordclement
  7. thatssowizard reblogged this from thenewrepublic
  8. thetifftastic reblogged this from ilovecharts
  9. lovewillalwaysbemyweapon reblogged this from ilovecharts
  10. This was featured in #News
  11. This was featured in #Politics
  12. think-progress posted this