This repository contains a description here of suggested visualization projects to augment the policy offerings from the TaxBrain web interface, as well as data sources to simulate what would eventually become a front-end integrated visualization tool.
TaxBrain (http://www.ospc.org/taxbrain/) is a web application that allows users with no economic modeling expertise to run a rich set of fiscal policy experiments using a number of sophisticated economic models.
The front-end web interface was built primarily through a partnership between the Open Source Policy Center at the American Enterprise Institute and developers at Continuum Analytics in Austin, Texas. The TaxBrain web application allows users to change a large set of tax policy parameters, submit those changes to be executed in a sophisticated economic model, have the model run on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and return the results as (currently) tabular output on a permanent URL web page associated with that particular experiment. All the code for the front-end web app is available in the GitHub repository https://github.com/OpenSourcePolicyCenter/webapp-public.
The back end of the TaxBrain web application is a suite of economic models ranging from microsimulation models that take 30 seconds to run (Tax-Calculator) to general equilbrium overlapping generations models that take seven hours to run (OG-USA).
- Interactive visualizations for Cost of Capital Calculator output
- Interactive visualizations for Tax-Calculator output
The Cost of Capital Calculator (https://www.ospc.org/ccc/) is a front-end web app for an underlying microsimulation model that takes corporate tax policy parameters and estimates the marginal tax rates on investment faced by firms broken down by industry, method of financing, and asset type. The microsimulation model is called B-tax and all its code is available at https://github.com/open-source-economics/B-Tax. The web application front end code is also available at https://github.com/opensourcepolicycenter/webapp-public.
Currently, the Cost of Capital Calculator output are tabular and can be changed by selecting different button options (see screenshot below).
One potential visualization using this data that has been used by the Congressional Budget office is the bubble chart below. We would love any ideas or improvements that you might have for better visualizing the tabular data above.
Example data from the tabular output above is in the data folder of this repository. Tabular output for options Industry, METTR, and Reform are in data/ccc_tab_output1.csv. Tabular output for options Industry, METTR, and Baseline are in data/ccc_tab_output2.csv. Tabular output for options Asset, METTR, and Reform are in data/ccc_tab_output3.csv. And tabular output for options Asset, METTR, and Baseline are in data/ccc_tab_output4.csv.
TaxBrain (https://www.ospc.org/TaxBrain/) is a front-end web app for an underlying microsimulation model and other richer models that takes tax policy parameters and macroeconomic model parameters and estimates the changes on federal tax revenues based on changes in those parameters. TaxBrain also provides estimates of the changes in tax liabilities to different segments of the population by decile of the income distribution and by age. The microsimulation model is called Tax-Calculator and all its code is available at https://github.com/open-source-economics/Tax-Calculator. The web application front end code is also available at https://github.com/opensourcepolicycenter/webapp-public.
Below is a screenshot of the first table of output of a run of Tax-Calculator from TaxBrain. A csv file of that table is available in the data folder of this repository data/tc_table1.csv.
Scrolling down the tabular output page of the TaxBrain web app, there are many more options for distributional tables. We would love input on interactive visualizations that can display the tax liability data over time as well as the distributional effects. 3D visualizations that can be clicked and dragged might also be valuable here.