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To: The Looking Spoon
Even without getting into the Bush tax cuts your graph is inaccurate and misleading.

For instance, the defense budget is about 1/6 of the total federal budget. that means that the ratio of non-military to military spending is about 5:1. Your green circle is about 5 times as wide as the yellow one. But the appearance of the graph clearly seems to imply that we should judge the size of these various amounts by the area of the circles. So your graph is implying that non-military spending is 25 times as big as military spending.

Also the total cost of the Bush tax cuts is estimated to be between 1 and 2 times the total cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Your graph seems to imply that the tax cuts are more like only 1/10 the cost of the wars, which seems too far off to be believable by any rational economist, even if we are just looking at one particular year.

It would be interesting to see the same type of diagram if it was corrected and redrawn.

9 posted on 07/16/2012 12:22:13 PM PDT by wideminded
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To: wideminded
I understand what you're saying 100%. I originally had a version of this using bars, and I changed it to the circles for aesthetic reasons. The scaling is accurate (I took my time to make sure of it), but I hadn't considered the "area" perception that you mention. In any case, I've taken you up on the suggestion...
10 posted on 07/16/2012 3:10:17 PM PDT by The Looking Spoon
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