Source: NYT Archive:

So, how does America’s middle class compare to those around the world? Not as good as it used to.

It takes a second to absorb these charts, but they show how other countries’ middle class incomes have closed the gap on the USA from 1980 to 2010. Except for our top income brackets – they are still the richest of all.

The original article tries to explain parts of this trend.

image

image

Is the American dream still alive? Can you work hard and raise your income level? Well, it kinda depends on where you live. The NYT has a couple of nice interactive tools who exploring the results of a study of the issue. (via FlowingData)

image

image

image

A spiffy annotated interactive visualization by the NYT on what different industries actually pay in taxes. The differences in rates between industries illustrate who is getting tax breaks. The related article is worth a read.

image

image

Interesting scientific work, building on prior studies from across the world. Rather than get into the findings in detail I refer you to the NYT article and a very detail FAQ at the authors’ website)

image

Apparently the forecasts for the current heat-wave in Australia are so hot that the Bureau of Meteorology had to add two new colors to it’s forecasting map:

image

And here is the NYT version of of the 2012 temperature map. I like the city histograms at the bottom.

image

An excellent annotated analysis by the NYT looking at federal, state, and corporate tax brackets.

image

image

image

image

image

image

Fantastic flow chart from the NYT showing what happens depending on which way swing states go.

image

Very cool videographics analyzing the history of the 100m race, long jump, and 100m freestyle swim:

image image image

The New York Times uses resized maps to illustrate some relative economic indicators. Resized non-contiguous cartograms are always interesting (mappingworlds for example), but I’m not sure they shed much light here as the country proportions are very similar across indicators. As usual, however, the NYT includes some very clear narrative notes to help you along.

image image

An excellent analysis of the players from both teams. The colors map out where shots were taken from, and how accurate they were.

image

The NYT presents a list of options for you to decide how to trim defense spending. As usual, it’s not quite as easy as you might think – but I still got it up over $800 billion.  I like this interactive way of educating people about budget issues.

image

Share of income that comes from government programs, broken down by type of benefit. (related article)

image

A number of news agencies took a crack at visualizing Obama’s 2013 budget proposal. (If you want to try it yourself, a shocking amount of detailed data is available in spreadsheet form at the OMB website).

Below is the Washington Post’s version. You can click on any box to see a column chart of historical values. It would have been nice to be able to drill down further, but this is a good start:

image

The NYT created a beautiful animated – ummm – I’m not sure what this is. A dorling diagram? Well, it looks pretty, and it’s slightly more detailed than the WashPost version, but I think the brain processes square area better than circles.

image image

The WSJ posted five charts, but they’re nothing special:

image

Originally from PCRM, but I link to the NYT commentary below. Farm subsidies are a joke. Actually, almost all subsidies are a joke, now that I think about it.

image

A treemap of the jobs that the 1% are doing – showing a lot of variety. I wish there was more detail about the dataset source. The related article provides some anecdotal examples.

image