003 The Data of Taxes – For the Love of Data

Huge thanks to @Deepak90Mittal for hanging out with me on this episode!

News Prologue:

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for BI is out – overhauled methodology, Oracle is out; Tableau and Microsoft (PowerBI) reign supreme!
- https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2XXET8P&ct=160204&st=sb)
SQL Server on Linux! = millions of geeks rejoice and it may spell the end of Windows in the data center.
- http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-server-on-linux/
- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/14/microsoft_sql_server_linux_not_insane/
Excel is the most popular DataViz tool by a longshot, followed by Python, D3, and Tableau
- http://www.randalolson.com/2016/03/11/what-data-visualization-tools-do-rdataisbeautiful-oc-creators-use/

A) 2016 State Comparison:

What you should drink Where – comparison of per gallon taxes on beer, wine and spirits converted to a per drink equivalency
1. Beer – Missouri
2. Wine – Lousiana
3. Liquor – Missouri
4. Best overall: Missouri, Wisconsin, California, Texas
Tax Freedom Day (a.k.a., Working for the Man) –
Interesting way to look at taxes – how long you have to work to cover federal, state, and local taxes for the year.
Gas Prices – Texas is pretty low (#42) on gas taxes! PA is #1; NY is #3; CA is #5

B) Federal Income Tax Stats

A rough calculation of the rate at which individual tax returns are filed within the US:

Start of Year:	1/1/2016
Filing Date:	4/18/2016
Days Elapsed:	108
Total Est. Returns (using 2013 #):	138,313,155
*Total filed per day:**	1,280,677
*Total filed per hour:**	53,362
*Total filed per minute:**	889
*Total filed per second:**	15
* All calculations rounded to nearest whole number

Key Findings from the report (mostly using data from 2013):

In 2012, the top 50 percent of all taxpayers (69.2 million filers) paid 97.2 percent of all income taxes while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.8 percent.
The top 1 percent (1.3 million filers) paid a greater share of income taxes (37.8 percent) than the bottom 90 percent (124.5 million filers) combined (30.2 percent).
The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a higher effective income tax rate than any other group, at 27.1 percent, which is over 8 times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (3.3 percent).