Visualizing the Bush Legacy.

The chart below first appeared on the U.S. House Democratic Caucus website, where links to the sources are included. It has been spread around since, but I've found no one who reworked the comparisons to make them more compelling.

Tables are an appropriate method of displaying numerical data for comparison, especially when the list contains a mixture of categories. But the point of this chart is polemical, not analytical. The designers might have chosen a less precise but more effective way to make the point: The country is not better off than it was seven years ago.

Below this chart, I did a quick version of an alternative display. It employs proportional comparisons of some of the indices in the two columns. There's no consistent scale from one set of bars to the next, because one data set is in trillions and another is in percentage points.

But I have preserved the relationship between each set of numbers so the spread between the pairs — the real point here — is clearer. If I were doing this to stand on its own, I'd add a key and place the actual numbers next to the bars.