Bang for Your Buck
A simple visualization app which shows which congressional districts are getting the most out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Submitted as part of Design for America.
Download the App
Overview
While recovery.gov provides a number of visual tools to look at awards by municipality and by state, it doesn’t provide any visual tools to examine data through the atomic political unit in the United States Congress—the congressional district.
This visualization allows relative comparisons of Recovery Act awards between congressional districts. It also lets us compare Recovery awards in the context of relative contributions to the Federal tax base.
Mapping by congressional district also allows us to make direct comparisons between a Representative's support or opposition to the Act and the fiscal benefit (or lack thereof) that their district received.
Bang for Your Buck was made by Jay Harlow, a designer in Brooklyn, NY. Say hi on Twitter, or .
Thanks to...
Bang for Your Buck couldn't have been made without help from Will Bailey
(code guidance), Aaron Suggs (stats and math), and Sarah Brennan
(Excel and stats).
About the Data
Unfortunately, there is a dearth of recovery and tax data organized by congressional district. In the spirit of the Sunlight Labs project, I felt it was important to work with even the limited data, in hopes that, as a proof-of-concept, it might suggest compelling reasons to collect and open more district-level data to the public.
I was unable to locate total Recovery award data per congressional district; data presented are for Q1 2010. Ideally these data would indicate total awards per district to date.
Tax data by district proved even harder to locate. The data used are estimated average income taxes by congressional district based on 2004 IRS data. The data are presented with the broad assumption that, in rough terms, the relative tax burdens of the districts have not changed significantly.
Coming Soon:
• Information hovers for individual districts
• Zooming controls
Sources
Recovery award data were gathered from recovery.gov.
Tax data by congressional district were much harder to locate. I was able to find estimated average income tax data by congressional district from the Tax Foundation.
Roll-call votes on H.R. 1 were obtained from the House of Representatives here and here.
The map of congressional districts is available via WikiCommons.
I used Processing to create the app, with the XlsReader and Geomerative libraries.
