CHART: The More Congress ‘Fails’ The More The Deficit Goes Down

This chart started with an idea: 'what if I could show how the various policies affect the deficit?'. I tried to do it in Google Charts but I quickly realized that was simply too limited. Instead, I went through the process of calculating how the four major policy changes outlined in the article each affected the deficit. Then I created a chart in Illustrator for each one and created the interactive chart you see above using Hype. The individual policies could have all been shown on the same chart, but it would have looked extremely busy and been hard to read and still wouldn't have contained as much information as the chart I created.

Note: Because Hype uses HTML 5, it works best in Safari and Chrome.

In this simple Google Chart, I decided to make the graphic into an area chart instead of a line chart to better illustrate the literal size of the deficit if current policies are continued. This is because the 7.1 number actually comes from adding up the difference between the two points in each year. Because this chart only goes up to 1.2 (trillion), readers might miss that detail in a regular line chart and not immediately understand where the 7.1 comes from.