Average Tax Rates for Married Filing Separately: 2009

The fourth in series of infographics I am designing to illustrate the average federal tax rate applied to different salaries. This time I am graphing the average tax rates for someone while married is filing a separate tax return from their spouse. The difference between this graph and that of a single taxpayer is that the cut offs for 28%, 33% and 35% rates are lower which will increases the average tax rates for people with an income over $78,000.

The income tax graph is created from the 2009 tax schedule for someone married filing separately from their spouse:

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

Average Tax Rates up to $400,000 for Single Filers: 2009

UPDATE 3/17/2010: I added more information about marginal tax rates by graphing the combined marginal tax rate line in the last graph. Also clarified that the employer-side of the payroll taxes are not included 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.

Payroll taxes 1970 vs 2004

Day 15 of 28 Days of Tax Data From Economist View

Here are tax rates by income group. In the graph we are looking at the payroll tax 1970 in blue and 2004 in red. I you might notice the payroll tax is much higher now especially on people in the bottom 99%.

Tax rates and Government Spending

Day 6 of 28 Days of Tax Data 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

Taxes: US vs OECD

Day 3 of "28 days of Tax Data" Update Here is a graph with 2007 data from (Thanks to Jerome Cukie for the pointer)

Unfortunately, this is only from 1955-2003 but I thought it was an interesting graph especially the comparison between Average Taxes on Income and Profits.

• Light green is OECD Average Taxes on Income and Profits
• Dark green is United States Average Taxes on Income and Profits

More taxes collected from Employment than from Corporate Profits

(I am starting a new series today: 28 days of Tax Data where I will be posting each day something I find interesting about the Untied States' Tax System)

From the Tableau Software blog Ellie Fields posted an analysis last year comparing the amount collected from Employment tax (Social Security, Medicare, Federal Unemployment taxes which are taxed per employee) vs the amount collected from Corporate tax (which is taxed per dollar of profit). This is for the Federal Government only.

The first graph shows that since the 1960s the amount of taxes from employment has increased relative to corporate taxes

The second graph is plotting the % change in the different between employment and corporate taxes collected. As each recession hit (shown as thick lines of red and pink) taxes collected from employment drop faster (i.e. layoffs) than from corporate taxes (less profit).

Visual Storytelling: Credit Crisis

An interactive graphic from the Wall Street Journal, which takes the data for 6 key financial indicators and stacks them while rollover text annotates the main events of the crisis. Created by Andrew Garcia Phillips, Stephen Grocer and Kate Milani.

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.

Making Sense out of Numbers

I was able to attend the Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge held at the Census Bureau in DC last week. It was an interesting mix of officials from government statistical offices, central banks with academics and designer/data geeks. Some of the highlights: Amanda Cox from the New York Time talking about how she is a like a tour bus driver describing the interesting stuff she finds, That she believes in visualizations that pull something forward while pushing back the rest of the data, have an annotation layer. Also that distributions are more interesting than averages, and when you have something move make sure you know why it is moving. Some of these principals you can see here and here

Helen North from the South Africa's Stats Office talking about the need to build trust in the data as well as to educate people in the uses of their data. This was accomplished by bringing together the delegates from the local municipalities so that they could learn about, discuss and debate with each other the demographic statistics collected about their home districts.

Irene Ros from ManyEyes talking about people uploading their personnel data (Warcraft stats, Facebook friends). She described how hey were using this tool to create "Data Mirrors" i.e. a picture about themselves. Also she mentioned that 88% of Wordle users feel creative when using the tool.

Jim Ridgway from Durham University's Smart Centre talked about students (14-15 year old) when face with a media story and data about the same subject were able to critique the story using the data and in some case spontaneously found more data to include in their critique.

David Spiegelhalter from Cambridge University demonstrated a very interesting site designs used to explain uncertainty to people. He stressed that there was no one right method as different people responded to different methods. During the discussion he brought up an important point to keep in mind when creating visualizations: what is the purpose behind the visualizations? Is it the

1. WOW! reaction?
2. to increase knowledge?
3. or to effect behavior?

Bailout plan

From Associated Press. Displaying the  $700 billion bailout plan from the American government by comparing the amount of money asked for to the size of the company. Circle size = % of bailout compared to market value of the company.

Found via Datavisualization.ch

Map of Idle Container Ships

Container ships parked off the Singapore coast. As of March 2009, 11.3 percent of the world's shipping capacity sat idle from How Google Earth explains the financial crisis found via ChartPorn