Juice's Stimulus Bill Explorer
By Zach Gemignani
February 11, 2009
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We’ve seen a lot of anxiety about the huge price tag of the stimulus bill winding its way through Congress. Some of the complaining is about the difficulty in understanding the contents of this complex legislation. Certainly the stimulus bill looks impenetrable if you try to sift through 700 pages of details or even a 25-page summary. In response many people evaluate it based on their gut feel.
To help out, we’ve created the Juice Stimulus Bill Explorer — a treemap visualization that summarizes the House version of the stimulus bill and let’s you vote on its pieces.
The data in this treemap comes from the 1/15/09 summary (pdf) of the House of Representatives version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Selecting any box will show a description of the individual program, the price tag, and an opportunity to express whether you like or dislike the idea. The treemap boxes are sized by the proposed cost of each program. The color is based on the average level of support for the program from user votes.
Thanks to Scott Love for encouraging us to put this together.
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5 comments
Winston Miller said:
Wow, this is pretty awesome. I think whoever made this needs to get the word out that this is available, it is a very easy way to understand where our money is going with this stimulus plan, and also a lot easier to understand than the 700+ pages of the actual plan. I'd like to see this upated to the new 2/7/09 package, but other than that, Awesome!
Scott Love said:
Hats off to the brain trust at juice analytics!! I hope other readers will spread the word and tag it so it can be discovered by as many voters as possible. The Stimulus Bill (ARRA of 2009) is almost beyond the scope of comprehension but this interactive presentation provides a way to navigate within an area of interest to help educate everyone irrespective of biases.
Thanks again for this important public service!
bart said:
this is a waste of time. it doesn't go into where the (people's) money is actualy spent. for example, what is a "tax cut"? are people who pay taxes going to get a break or are people who don't pay taxes going to continue to recieve money from those who do pay taxes?
It's a cute little gimmick chart but, like most liberal ideas, dumb once you start peeling the onion.
Mike said:
Great presentation. I agree with bart that it would be more useful if we could drill into more detail. The inability to do this really reduces the value of the red and blue to a vote on a general idea. Unfortunately his inflammatory comment on "most liberal ideas" makes him sound a bit like an AM radio parrot and detracts from the valuable part of his comment.
On a technical point, I can't get this to run in Firefox, either on Linux or Windows.
Mike Chelen said:
It runs okay for me with Firefox 3 in Ubuntu using Macromedia Flash plugin. More detail or links to further reader would be nice.
said:
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