Where do Americans get the income they earn each year?
According to the IRS, via the Tax Foundation, the answer is to be found in the interactive chart below, which shows the IRS' preliminary data for how many billions of dollars Americans earned in 2012 through salaries and wages, capital gains, taxable pensions, dividends, unemployment benefits, et cetera....
One thing we should note about this particular data is that the figure for Wages and Salaries is increased by the business incomes earned by the owners of S-corporations and sole proprietorships, where the owners of these kinds of small businesses report add their net business income to their actual personal income on their annual personal income tax returns, which the IRS does not differentiate by source in their statistics of income reports.
This post is really an excuse for us to test drive Tableau's free public app for visually presenting data online, while we're awaiting the release of the data we track for other projects! As for Tableau's graphing app, our initial impression is that it's a little quirky, but it looks to have some interesting capabilities.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we have taken the January 2015 inflation data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics just last Thursday (26 February 2015) to update our S&P 500 At Your Fingertips and our Investing Through Time tools through January 2015. And before you ask, we'll be doing the same with our Quarterly S&P 500 Data Since 1871 tool through 2014 once the earnings data for that year is finalized after March 2015 - remember, the data for the fourth quarter of that year is still being reported during the first quarter of this one, so it doesn't make sense to update that particular tool until it's all done!