Posts for Tag: graph

How is your income distributed across tax brackets?

I previously made a graphical visualization of income and marginal tax rates to show how tax brackets work. That graph tried to show alot of info on the same graph, i.e. the breakdown of income tax brackets for incomes ranging from $10,000 to $3,000,000. It was nice looking, but I think several people were confused about how to read the graph. This Sankey graph is a more detailed look at the tax breakdown for one specific income. You can enter your (or any other) profile and see how taxes are distributed across the different brackets. It can help (as the other tried) to better understand marginal and average tax rates. This tool only looks at US Federal Income taxes and ignores state, local and Social Security/Medicare taxes.

Generate URL – Use this button to generate a URL that you can share a specific set of inputs and graphs. Just copy the URL in the address bar at the top of your browser (after pressing the button).

• Select filing status: Single, Married Filing Jointly or Head of Household. For more info on these filing categories see the IRS website
• Enter your regular income and capital gains income. Regular income is wage or employment income and is taxed at a higher rate than capital gains income. Capital gains income is typically investment income from the sale of stocks or dividends and taxed at a lower rate than regular income.
• Move your cursor or click on the Sankey graph to select a specific link. This will give you more information about how income in a specific tax bracket is being taxed.

**Click Here to view other financial-related tools and data visualizations from engaging-data**

As seen with the marginal rates graph, there is a big difference in how regular income and capital gains are taxed. Capital gains are taxed at a lower rate and generally have larger bracket sizes. Generally, wealthier households earn a greater fraction of their income from capital gains and as a result of the lower tax rates on capital gains, these household pay a lower effective tax rate than those making an order of magnitude less in overall income.

Tax Brackets By Year

This table lets you choose to view the thresholds for each income and capital gains tax bracket for the last few years. You can see that tax rates are much lower for capital gains in the table below than for regular income.

• If you are single, all of your regular taxable income between 0 and $9,525 is taxed at a 10% rate. This means that your all of your gross income below $12,000 is not taxed and your gross income between $12,000 and $21,525 is taxed at 10%.
• If you have more income, you move up a marginal tax bracket. Any taxable income in excess of $9,525 but below $38,700 will be taxed at the 12% rate. It is important to note that not all of your income is taxed at the marginal rate, just the income between these amounts.
• Income between $38,700 and $82,500 is taxed at 24% and so on until you have income over $500,000 and are in the 37% marginal tax rate . . .
• Thus, different parts of your income are taxed at different rates and you can calculate an average or effective rate (which is shown in the summary table).
• Capital gains income complicates things slightly as it is taxed after regular income. Thus any amount of capital gains taxes you make are taxed at a rate that corresponds to starting after you regular income. If you made $100,000 in regular income, and only $100 in capital gains income, that $100 dollars would be taxed at the 15% rate and not at the 0% rate, because the $100,000 in regular income pushes you into the 2nd marginal tax bracket for capital gains (between $38,700 and $426,700).

 
Data and Tools:
Tax brackets and rates were obtained from the IRS website and calculations were made using javascript and code modified from the Sankeymatic plotting website.

How is your income distributed across tax brackets?

This updated visualization is a detailed look at the breakdown how taxes are applied to your income across each of the tax brackets. The previous version of this visualization was a Sankey graph and this new version combines the sankey view with a mekko (or marimekko) graph view. It should help you to better understand marginal and average tax rates. This tool only looks at US Federal Income taxes and ignores state, local and Social Security/Medicare taxes.

**Click Here to view other financial-related tools and data visualizations from engaging-data**

Instructions for using the visual tax calculator:

• Tax Year: Select year from list of years as bracket sizes and deduction changes by year
• Select filing status: Single, Married Filing Jointly or Head of Household. For more info on these filing categories see the IRS website
• Senior checkbox Seniors are eligible for additional standard deduction and from 2025-2028 eligible for additional deduction even if you itemize
• Enter your regular income and capital gains income. Regular income is wage or employment income and is taxed at a higher rate than capital gains income. Capital gains income is typically investment income from the sale of stocks or dividends and taxed at a lower rate than regular income.
• Move your cursor or click on the Sankey graph to select a specific link. This will give you more information about how income in a specific tax bracket is being taxed.
• Itemized deduction Enter the amount of itemized deductions you have including: state and local (property) taxes, mortgage interest, charitable contributions and medical expenses above 7.5% of your AGI

Interpreting the tax visualization graphs

Both the sankey and mekko graphs help you easily the size each of these tax brackets and the fraction of income in that bracket that you can keep and the fraction going to taxes. Also shown is the split of the regular income vs capital gains and how capital gains is “stacked” on top of the regular income.

The mekko graph is a stacked horizontal bar graph where the height of each bar is proportional to the size of the tax bracket and the bar is split into two parts: a keep and a tax portion. This makes it clear the progressive nature of the tax code, initial tax brackets are taxed at the lowest amounts and as you fill up more tax brackets, the tax rate, and the amount of money you must give to the government, increases.

As seen with the marginal rates graph, there is a big difference in how regular income and capital gains are taxed. Capital gains are taxed at a lower rate and generally have larger bracket sizes. Generally, wealthier households earn a greater fraction of their income from capital gains and as a result of the lower tax rates on capital gains, these household pay a lower effective tax rate than those making an order of magnitude less in overall income.

Also shown is a summary bar graph that shows the split in your total income into a part that you keep and the other that owed to taxes, i.e. your average tax rate.

How Do Tax Brackets Work

This is a written description of how to apply marginal tax rates. The income you have is split across various tax brackets, which by analogy can be thought of as buckets where once you fill one up, the additional money goes into another bucket, until that is filled up and so on until all your income is distributed across these brackets. The last brackets are open-ended so they are of infinite size.

You start with your deductions which changes based on your filing status, age and if you have itemized deductions. You fill this up first and you can think of this as the 0% tax bracket. Then any additional income goes into the 10% bracket where 10% of this income goes to taxes. This proceeds then onto the 12%, 22% and so on brackets.

The default example is described here for tax year 2025

• If you are single, your standard deduction is $15,750 and you pay no taxes on this money. After that, all of your regular taxable income up to $11,925 is taxed at a 10% rate. This means that your all of your gross income below $15,750 is not taxed and your gross income between $15,750 and $27,675 is taxed at 10%.
• If you have more income, you move up a marginal tax bracket. The next $36,550 in additional taxable income will be taxed at the 12% rate. It is important to note that not all of your income is taxed at the marginal rate, just the income in this bracket these amounts.
• The next $48,900 is taxed at 22% and so on until you have income over $500,000 and are in the 37% marginal tax rate . . . In the default case, you only have $3,775 instead of $48,900 so this portion is taxed at 22%.
• Thus, different parts of your income are taxed at different rates. If you have additional income that puts you into a higher tax bracket, that only affects the added income. This is the approach you would use to calculate an average or effective rate (which is shown in the summary table).
• Capital gains income complicates things slightly as it is taxed after regular income. Thus any amount of capital gains taxes you make are taxed at a rate that corresponds to starting after you regular income. If you made $100,000 in regular income, and only $100 in capital gains income, that $100 dollars would be taxed at the 15% rate and not at the 0% rate, because the $100,000 in regular income pushes you into the 2nd marginal tax bracket for capital gains (between $48,350 and $533,400).
• if the 0% capital gains rate threshold is at $48,350, then any regular income you have will take away from this 0% bracket size. If you have $48,000 in regular taxable income after your deduction, then you will be left with only $350 in 0% capital gains bracket space and the remainder of your capital gains will be taxed in the next bracket, 15%.

Tax Brackets By Year

This table lets you choose to view the thresholds for each income and capital gains tax bracket for the last few years. You can see that tax rates are much lower for capital gains in the table below than for regular income.

 
Data and Tools:
Tax brackets and rates were obtained from the IRS website and calculations were made using javascript, CSS and HTML. The sankey graph was made using code modified from the Sankeymatic plotting website and the mekko graph was made using the Plotly javascript open source library.

This is one of an ongoing series of visualizations about the state of California. This one is about the state’s economy, which recently moved into 4th place (2024), if California were its own country. It is, however, still part of the United States.

The visualization shows the relative sizes of the top 10 world economies (including the US, with California removed for context). California has the smallest population of any of the top 10, with #9 Canada just barely larger than California in population, though with a significantly smaller sized economy (about 1/2 the size).

Hover over the countries to see their GDP and population. California is behind the United States, China and Germany in total economic output (in nominal terms), but ahead of much larger countries Japan and India and the United Kingdom.

The state’s economy produces $4.1 Trillion dollars of economic output, driven by a range of industries including technology, real estate, manufacturing, agriculture and health care. It is a hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. California is also the leading agricultural state in the United States. Immigration is a huge part of the state’s workforce.

Sources and Tools:
2024 economic data was downloaded from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This visualization is made using d3.js, an open-source javascript visualization library.

Which majors are most competitive across the University of California system?

The University of California consists of nine campuses with undergraduate programs and they are all ranked among the best universities in the US (according to US News). All nine rank within the top 45 public schools including #1 and #2 and top 85 national universities in the US.

This data visualization focuses on the acceptance rates for students based on their indicated preferred majors in their application to the various University of California campuses in the Fall of 2023 admissions cycle. When you apply to a given university campus, you need to specify a major and this choice can affect the student’s chances of getting accepted, especially if the major is very sought after. Subjects like computer science are very popular and as a result, the data shows that most campuses have a lower acceptance rate for computer science as compared to the university as a whole.

Data visualization

The graph shown in the data visualization is a marimekko graph which shows a percentage based bar graph showing the acceptance rate (in blue) for a given major at a given university. The height of each horizontal bar is proportional to the number of applicants to that major, so taller bars have more applicants vs bars that are shorter. If you hover over (or click on mobile) a bar, it provides more information about the acceptance rate, enrollment rate (i.e. yield rate) and the GPA of accepted students. You can choose to sort the graph by subject name, admit rate or number of applicants.

The data visualization can help you explore different campuses and major categories. If you are viewing “School View“, you can see how the various disciplines compare for a single university at one time. Whereas if you view “Subject View” you can see the comparison of a single discipline across the University campuses that offer those majors.

The University of California has over 240,000 undergraduate students and extends about 140,000 acceptances to fill out 42,000 slots for first year students. There is a significant amount of overlap as most students applying for admission apply to several campuses, and many students get accepted to multiple campuses.

The broad disciplines used in the visualization are composed of a number of individual majors and these are detailed in the table below.

GPA calculation

The University of California only considers grades from 10th grade and 11th grade for admissions decisions, and uses a weighted system where honors and AP classes are given an extra point in GPA calculations above the normal A=4, B=3, C=2, etc. . GPA calculation. So for an honors math class, for example, an A would be worth 5 points.

Sources and Tools:
Data comes directly from the University of California website for the fall of 2023, which has quite a bit of interesting data about students and admissions. I downloaded the data and processed it with python to organize it. The webtool is made using javascript, HTML and CSS and graphed using the open-source plotly graphing library.

Table of Disciplines to majors

This table lists the specific areas and majors that make up the broad disciplines shown in the data visualization.

Play with an interactive spirograph and share your creations with your friends. Just play around with the controls at the top and see what interesting designs you can come up with.

Instructions
– Wheel Size controls the size of the wheel inside the ring
– Hole Distance controls the distance from the center of the wheel and the edge
– Drawing Speed controls the speed at which the spirograph is spins
– Line Thickness controls the thickness of the line on the drawing
– Line Color is a color picker letting you change the color of the lines
– Show Ring and Wheel lets you toggle whether the Ring and Wheel are showing
– Clear erases the design
– generates a custom URL and copies it to the clipboard so you can share this exact design with your friends.
– / allows you to start and stop the spirograph animation

Equations
The spirographs shown here are hypotrochoids, which is described as a curve generated by tracing a point attached to a circle that rolls around the interior of a larger circle. The equations for the curve are:
\begin{aligned}&x(\theta )=(R-r)\cos \theta +d\cos \left({R-r \over r}\theta \right)\\&y(\theta )=(R-r)\sin \theta -d\sin \left({R-r \over r}\theta \right)\end{aligned}

Sources and Tools
The equations for the spirograph hypotrochoids are from Wikipedia. The drawings and UI are made using canvas and HTML/Javascript and CSS.

What are the main sources of California’s electricity?

I added the option to view the graph for any day or monthly average from April 2018 to the present using the calendar picker and a daily generation summary

In the United States, electric power plant emissions account for about 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. However, California has been a leader in the transition to clean and renewable energy, driven by ambitious climate policies and a commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The state has set an electricity target for the state of 60% renewables by 2030 and 100% zero-carbon, clean electricity by 2045. To meet these targets, the state has been investing heavily into solar and wind energy sources. Solar is the largest proportion of California’s electricity grid and California now generates more solar energy than any other state.

The California Independent System Operator manages the grid for around 32 million Californians or about 80% of the total demand in the state. Here is a map showing the service area and the other electricity districts in the state, the main exceptions include the city of LA and the Sacramento area.

How to read the graph of California’s electricity

The graphs shown here allow us to visualize how electricity generation in the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) region varies over the course of the day. We can see how solar ramps up to be a huge contributor in the middle of the day. And overall, the vast majority of the generation in the state is one form of renewable electricity or another (e.g. solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, biomass and biogas). Add in a small contribution from zero-carbon nuclear energy and we can see that a large majority of power generation comes from zero-carbon sources. It also shows the total electricity demand, which should always be less than the total electricity supply in the state.

Because of the intermittent nature of some renewables, like wind and solar, there are times where the demand for electricity is not able to be met by these sources, and other options are needed to maintain supply demand balance on the state’s grid. To address this issue, the state relies on importing power from outside of the state as well as energy storage (primarily batteries) to meet electricity demand when renewable energy supply is low. If demand is much less than supply, then likely there will be power exported or some charging of batteries. And if demand is less than total generation in the state, power will be imported and/or batteries will be discharged to make up for the power shortfall.

On the graph, positive values from batteries and imports is when those sources are supplying power to the California grid. Negative values for batteries and exports are when there is excess power in the state and batteries are being charged up or power is being exported to neighboring states.

You can view the graph in two forms:

• Detailed – shows all of the power plant fuel types that is provided in the CAISO data: Solar, Wind, Nuclear, Coal, Other, Natural Gas, Large Hydropower, Small Hydropower, Geothermal, Biomass and Biogas. In addition, it shows aggregated net imports into the state from other regions as well as battery discharging or charging.
• Simplified – I aggregated the categories from CAISO into Solar, Wind, Nuclear, Fossil Fuel (including Coal, Other and Natural Gas), Hydro (Large and Small Hydropower), and Other Renewable (Geothermal, Biomass and Biogas). In addition, it shows aggregated net imports into the state from other regions as well as battery discharging or charging.

Also, I added the ability to see yesterday’s data as well. In the future, I will add the ability to see other dates as well.

Data Sources and Tools
Data for electricity sources for California grid comes from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). This data from this site is downloaded and processed using a python script and updated every 5 minutes. The graph is made using the open source Plotly javascript graphing library.