Jed Sundwall created an alternate view of that tax chart I posted to the other day, replacing the circles with bars.

Jed makes the point that circles are “terrible for displaying comparable quantitative information” and to a degree he’s right. The circles give an approximate view of the differences but are inexact and his bars certainly do a better job of showing just how enormous the disparity the proposed tax break is for the highest earners under the Republican plan.

I still like the circles, though. Jed’s bars do tell the story of how incredibly unfair the Republican proposal is but at the expense of any further information; the bars only tell one story. Even given that his bars are interactive, it’s basically impossible to give any context to the other numbers on the chart. You could argue it’s because that bottom red bar blows everything out of proportion, but should that limit the reader’s ability to draw any further meaning from the numbers?

For instance, with the Post’s circles, you can tell, even at a glance, that both Republican and Democratic tax plans are going to cut taxes for everyone making less than $500,000 a year at almost identical rates. You can also see that the Democrat’s plan looks pretty unfair to the top two tiers of income earners – I’d expect those circles to keep getting bigger, though certainly not the exponential increase that Republicans are proposing. By adding a second dimension, you tell a broader story at the expense of some exactness, a worthy goal for a newspaper. My one beef with the Post’s chart is with the colors – why not use the standard navy blue and red that everyone already associates with Democrats and Republicans?

Numbers are meant to be infallible but we all know, especially in politics, that’s a damn lie. They tell stories just like any other facts and rely on the story teller to present them honestly.