Saturday, October 25, 2008

Visualizing our national debt

I am a big fan of the well-designed visualization. The good folks who publish the Mint.com blog just published one I particularly like. It visualizes our national debt as a series of credit card balances drawn against the financiers of our runaway government spending -- the Bank of Japan, the Bank of China, the OPEC nations, etc.

The amounts are normalized to the median income of a typical American family ($50,233). Very illuminating.

By the way, if you haven't tried the Mint service, it's definitely worth a whirl. I think they are probably within 6-9 months away from enabling to kick my Quicken habit of over 10 years.

The way they visually show you:
  • How you're spending
  • How your portfolio compares to the major indexes (even though no one wants to see that these days), and
  • How your spending compares with people in your own or other cities is astounding.
Intuit ought to buy these guys and put the (now free) Quicken.com out of its misery.

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