Bad Doggie!

I was not happy with the Pioneer Press's front page infographic today, so I wrote this letter to the editor. If you would like more information about why this graphic is wrong, I recommend reading Edward Tufte's excellent book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. For the budget figures themselves, see Bush's 2005 and 2006 budgets.



Bad Budget Infographic

I was disappointed with the Pioneer Press's front page infographic about President Bush's budget (February 8). Because of its shoddy design, it gave readers a false impression of the relative impact of Bush's proposals on the budget as a whole. First, the graphic depicted a one-dimensional number (the percentage increase or decrease) as a two-dimensional arrow, with larger percentages represented by longer and wider arrows. This gives a mistaken impression of the relative difference between the numbers. Second, presenting the budget numbers as percentages without showing the size of each program creates a false equivalency. In dollar terms, an 11.5% cut in Housing and Urban Development ($2.8 billion) is small compared to a 4.5% increase in military spending ($17.6 billion). Showing such a large representation of a relatively small cut gives the false impression that Bush's budget will make a real difference in reducing the size of the federal deficit, which it will not.