Death and Taxes Canada
With another election coming up, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit this post about public spending. The political media is naturally concerned with changes — a few billion dollars in new programs here or spending cuts there — but it's hard to understand changes without having some sort of baseline. This chart (which I made from the Treasury Board's 2011 estimates) should give some context to the coming weeks' campaign.
Edit: In addition to the spending on this chart, the federal government spends $30.3 billion on federal debt charges. Forgot to put that in, and it's too late to add it now... It'll have to wait to the next revisit!
Death & Taxes BC
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.
