Hey folks,

We had another great livestream on Wednesday building a figure from the Washington Post. I talked about this plot last month in the newsletter as being a faceted waffle plot. We had a lot of fun building the figure! I didn’t think we’d get to it, but we even came up with a clever approach to making the non-uniform circles to depict each response to the WP’s survey. You’ll have to watch the livestream to see how we did it.

I have really enjoyed the interaction with the people who are joining and chatting as I code. There were as many as 25 people logged in at any given time. From the people who told us where they were from, most were from outside the US: Sudan, Dominican Republic, the Philippines, and Greece were represented. It never ceases to amaze me how far a reach the channel has. I would love for that reach to also be deep. Please tell your friends about the channel and encourage them to participate.

I’m trying to do these every Wednesday morning at 9 AM EST

In the US, Congress just passed a mega funding and budget bill. According to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, the budget bill is “regressive”. This means that it hurts the poor and helps the wealthy. The New York Times had a plot showing this in an article from last month (free link!) that illustrates this.

I suspect the specific estimates have changed between when this estimate came out and the final version, but I thought the figure was interesting. It would be fun to try to recreate this plot for a few reasons.

First off, it’s a bar plot. The bars go both above and below the zero point on the y-axis. The bars are also labelled at their furthest extent with the actual values. A second label for each bar indicates the decile that the data correspond to with the poorest on the left and the most wealthy on the right.

To create the basic plot, we’d use geom_col() to generate the bars. I’d strip out the x and y-axes, background, and grid lines to give the plot a minimal appearance. To indicate the zero y-axis intercept, I’d use geom_hline() to draw in the solid black line. I’d also create a column to indicate whether the percent change was positive or negative and then set the fill aesthetic to vary by the type of change.

I’d use geom_text() to add two types of text data.

First, I’d use it to add the percent change. The y-aesthetic would be set by the percent change. I’d use one of the position argument functions or nudge arguments to move the location of the text further out from the bar. Perhaps I’d need to create a column in my data frame that indicates whether we need a positive or negative nudge depending on the direction of the data. Of course, we’d also want to change the color of the text to match the fill color of the bar.

Second, I’d use geom_text() to also add the x-axis text. I’d likely make a separate column in my data frame to indicate the formatted decile (e.g., “10th-20th”) and another column for the y-axis position for the deciles. This font appears to be a dark gray - perhaps matching the subtitle and caption color - and a smidge smaller than the percentage text. We can change those with the size and color aesthetics.

Finally, the title, subtitle, and caption are all relatively straightforward. We can put those in with the labs() function and adjust their styling using theme()’s plot.title, plot.subititle, and plot.caption arguments.

An added challenge you might undertake is to generate the plot without writing out a specific tibble for these values. The underlying data from the CBO is available as a XLSX spreadsheet and you can find a slightly different version of this figure in their report as Figure 2. If you want to try reading the data in directly from the spreadsheet, you might try to use the {readxl} package. We’ll need to select the second page and deal with the extra lines at the top of that page.

Give this plot a try on your own. Be sure to tune in to a future livestream when I'll recreate this plot live!

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