Middle-class tax cuts and increases from Senate bill

A lot of tax debate centers around the “average” American family, with focus on both tax cuts and increases for what seems like the same groups of people. The difficulty in these arguments is that there’s a ton of variation within the same income brackets because of the various factors to consider in tax calculations.

Quoctrung Bui and Ben Casselman, reporting for The Upshot, explain with 25,000 example households plotted by the tax delta and income.

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Every tax cut and increase in House Republicans’ bill

The House Republicans will vote on a tax bill soon that adds about $1.4 trillion to the federal debt. Alicia Parlapiano and Adam Pearce, reporting for The New York Times, look at every change in this scroller.

I like that the visual is kept simple with a two-column, stacked bar chart as the backdrop. The chart provides scale, but the focus in on the text.

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Given your income, most beneficial tax breaks

With the release of the Republican proposed tax plan, Reuben Fischer-Baum and Kevin Schaul look at where deductions and tax credits are currently. Enter your adjusted gross income or click and drag a slider and the areas shift in the chart to show the most beneficial, given the income.

Naturally, I now await to see how this contrasts with the plan.

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Income Taxes You Would Pay in Each State

Some states have high rates. Some have low. But whether a state is lower or higher for you depends on more than just the high brackets. Read More

How much the US imports from Mexico

Most goods imported from Mexico are untaxed under the North American Free Trade Agreement. The Administration wants to tax those billions of dollars of goods coming in. David Yanofsky for Quartz plotted the imported products.

Quartz gathered import data from the US Census Bureau comprising 6,011 hierarchical product categories, the amount imported, and the tax collected. Every product the US buys at least $1 million worth from Mexico is shown below through the lens of the Harmonized System, the international standard for categorizing and taxing traded goods.

The x-axis shows the percentage of international imports for a product come from Mexico. The y-axis, as well as bubble size, shows how much the US spent in the year November 2015-2016. Color represents tax rate.

The hierarchical representation confused me at first. We typically see bubble plots charted on three dimensions from a flat, rectangular dataset. That is, there’s an x-value, a y-value, and a z-value (for bubble size), and each bubble represents a separate category. However, with this representation, each smaller circle is a subset of a larger circle.

For example, here’s the plot for avocados:

It’s a plot with five bubbles, which starts with the fruit and nuts category and goes down to a certified organic Hass avocados subcategory. So there’s the hierarchy, the x-y position, bubble size, and color. The color scale represents 0% to 20%, but only the really tiny bubbles fall in the high range, and at that point it’s hard to see what color it is.

I think it’s a good concept. But it might try to show too much at once.

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Balance the Trump and Cruz tax plans

Trump and Cruz budget cutsThe tax plans of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump might seem fine if you don’t think about the actual values. Tax cuts. Less government spending. But then it gets tricky when you look at what they’re actually proposing. Alvin Chang for Vox provides a simple interactive to show what the Cruz and Trump and budgets require.

They want to cut so much government spending that it’s virtually impossible to figure out how they’d do it. Cruz wants to cut spending by $8.6 trillion over the next decade, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis, and Trump wants to cut it by $9.5 trillion. To put this in perspective, the entire budget for this fiscal year is $3.9 trillion.

Be sure to go to the bottom to try to balance the the budgets yourself.

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Married couple tax bonuses and penalties

Tax brackets for married couples

Using calculations by Nick Kasprak from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Kyle Pomerleau from Tax Foundation, Amanda Cox shows tax penalties and bonuses for married couples.

The x-axis is total earnings, and the y-axis is the split between the couples. Percentages for penalties and bonuses are versus what couples would pay if they were allowed to file individually. Make your way towards the low end or high end of total earnings, closer to a 50-50 split between the pair, and you run into higher penalties.

Have a child? It gets more painful almost all across the board.

Enter your salary and your spouse's salary to see where you are. Good times.

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LEGO explainer: Taxes and income inequality

LEGOs make everything better. David Wessel for Brookings Institution explains how federal taxes play a role in decreasing the income gap. Each column an income quintile and each brick a lump of money.

[via @_cingraham]

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State Income Tax Brackets Charted

I'm sure you finished your taxes months ago, but here's a chart of the tax brackets and rates in all the states in case you're interested. Each segment represents a bracket, and the darker the shade the higher the rate.

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Since this is tax data, there's a healthy dose of footnotes about taxes in various states. See Tax Foundation for the details.

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Prostitution, GDP, and £1.7 billion due

David Spiegelhalter, professor of public understanding of risk, does some back-of-the-napkin math to describe why recent prostitution estimates for the UK are problematic.

As always, it's best to do a simple reality check. The ONS assumptions come to around 61,000,000 visits a year. Let's say 50,000,000 are from locals rather than foreign visitors. There are around 27,000,000 men between 18 and 50 in the UK (taking an arbitrary upper limit), so this would mean that on average each of them buys sex twice a year. In fact the latest Natsal survey found that 3.6% of men reported paying for sex in the last 5 years - let's say that means that considerably less than 1,000,000 men a year pay for sex, maybe 500,000. So the ONS assumptions mean that men who pay for sex do so on average twice a week. This seems high.

The assumptions also mean that the average person working in prostitution is turning over nearly £100,000 a year, which Jolyon from Tax Relief 4 Escorts says is completely implausible, and he should know.

Spiegelhalter makes a few of his own assumptions in there, but you can see why estimating illegal activity and then using those numbers to calculate gross domestic product can be a challenge.

If you recall, the gross domestic product for the United Kingdom rose by 5 percent, largely in part due to estimates trying to account for drug sales and prostitution. Given that illegal activity and careful, public record-keeping typically don't go together, the new numbers were rough at best. For prostitution in particular, the numbers from the Office of National Statistics estimated an extra £5.7 billion added to the GDP.

The problem now is that the United Kingdom, as a member of the European Union, apparently owes £1.7 billion. This is based on gross national income which uses gross domestic product in its equation. Ouch. Consequences.

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