US Income Distribution by State (opens in new tab)

Seeing a state-vs-state comparison is interesting, but it really doesn't mean all that much to say that people making under $25,000/year take in 24.7% of the country's income, at least not unless you tell us how many people make up that "under $25k" demographic.

I have a few negative points to make about this graph.

1) Maps are generally useful for area-based values, not population-based. A simple bar graph is equally as informative.

2) The bin sizes are unequal "below 40" and "above 60" bins may be misleading depending on how many states fall into those bins. Why bin at all? Just select a color in the colormap associated with that states value.. The bins are even worse on the state-by-state graph (25k bins mixed with 50k bins).

3) I'm left to assume that the %'s in the state-by-state section is % of households in the state, but it's not clearly stated and could be interpreted as % wealth or something.. And the national breakdown would be better in-line with the other states (but segregated) so that a state can be eyeball-compared to the national breakdown.

4) green/blue is usually associated with low values and red/orange with high. I understand why the colors were chosen, but it took me a couple of seconds before I realized I was interpreting them backward.

B-

Interesting surprises (to me anyway): Oregon, Utah, and Maine

It's telling that DC has the highest concentration per capita of people making more than $200,000/year.

Somewhat interesting, but useless without taking into account the cost of living in each state.

How come Alaska is so wealthy?

OK, I read the infographic and its parent article, but I still haven't seen where they are sourcing the data from. Is this mint data? US Government data?

Edit: as both posts say below, it's from the US Census Bureau. I didn't see it when reading from my phone. Thanks!