The Plummeting Federal Bank Account
During last summer's debt crisis, the federal government's bank account balance was in serious risk of hitting zero. Unfortunately, this wasn't easy to graph, since the Treasury only releases its figures in a series of individual text documents. In the end, it took a series of Python scripts to crawl through each file to extract the relevant information to make this graph.
Originally ran in Slate on Aug. 8, 2011.
data visualization,
data mining,
politics,
news