Big numbers are a problem – specifically, a political one. Humans have never been good at coming to grips with the truly astronomical – it has only been recently in our evolution, after all, that we’ve had to tackle any number ending in “illion” – and we usually have to resort to crazy visualizations or a logarithmic scale to make any sense of big numbers. This makes it very difficult for the average taxpayer to put government announcements in context, because what is a government budget but a list of extremely large numbers? That’s one of the reasons that I love the annual Death & Taxes poster: it makes it so much easier to see the big picture. Unfortunately, there’s only a Death & Taxes chart for the United States federal budget, which (as interested as I am in American politics) doesn’t affect me all that much. That’s why I thought I’d do something similar with the British Columbia provincial budget, and get a feel for the orders of magnitude involved.
All figures come from the 2009 estimates document found at the bottom of this page. As in the original Death & Taxes, everything is to scale; that is, the area of each circle is proportional to the money it represents.
