lookatdata

As we approach another Finals appearance for LeBron James, we do so in the wake of a flood of Jordan vs. James comparisons. Some say the "King" can never reach "His Airness ." Others say he's already there . It is most definitely futile to limit any "GOAT" comparison to something as simple as a ring count: Does Robert Horry's seven rings make him better than Michael Jordan's six? Is Ron Harper as equally "great" as Kobe Bryant, both of whom have five rings?  No, something as complex as the infamous "Greatest of All Time" claim requires an equally as complex data set.  What follows are graphs of the major statistical categories for LeBron James and Michael Jordan over their first fourteen seasons and first twelve playoff appearances. Jordan's career actually includes fifteen seasons and thirteen playoff appearances, but in order to see a year-to-year comparison, I only included data for the length of James...

If you take the data provided by the Government Publishing Office and graph the total dollars spent since 1962 on U.S. federal spending, you get something that looks like this: And while this graph is useful--it tells us that U.S. federal spending has increased semi-exponentially over the past fifty years--it doesn't paint a clear picture of how spending on each function has changed over time. To see that, we need a graph with each function represented as a percentage of total spending, which looks like this: For the majority of functions, federal spending has remained at a consistent percentage of total spending. However, for the big five--national defense, health, medicare, social security, and income security--spending has fluctuated quite drastically (both positively and negatively) over the past fifty years.  Below each function is highlighted in a separate graph. I've provided a list of sub-functions that make up the spending within the larger function al...