Because every place worth going can be found on a topo map.
This visualization of the stimulus makes me wish I was fifty years older so I could chase it off my lawn with a cane.
There’s nothing actively wrong about it, rather, it communicates (or fails to communicates) a relatively simple set of data in a way that is both overly complex and unintuitive. Even the most basic element of any 2D graph is confusing. The choice to have time going downthe y-axis is something I’ve only scene in genealogical trees. The standard for time progression is left to right on the x-axis, and, while standards are not meant to be unbreakable, a visualization should have a good reason for causing the viewer the extra headache. In this case, I’m not sure why that choice was made.
Compound the y-axis choice with the odd x-axis and this graph really starts to have problems. I second Kyle’s opinion that it’s not as obvious as it could be that the values are in billions, furthermore, the values themselves are hidden throughout the graph itself, tacked to the ends of the funding programs, which makes it that much harder to easily access the information you’re concerned with. I further support Kyle’s critique (I really should write these sooner so I have more original to say) that the overlapping color palette does a disservice to the viewer.
In short, there are a lot of small things about this graph that are a little bit confusing, but they all compound to form a visualization that take more effort to figure out than its meager data really deserves. A much simpler left to right time design, and possibly including the projected cost of the tax cuts on the same graph could make things a lot simpler.
