The use and abuse of bar graphs - A lesson in spin
Ken Schultz, a political scientist at Stanford, was inspired by the misleading Wall Street Journal graphic and disappeared Tax Foundation blog post to illustrate just how easy it is to manipulate bar graphs by changing the boundaries of the bins:
I thought it would be an interesting exercise to see how easily someone without scruples could twist the same data to support whatever argument they wanted to make about the distribution of taxable income (and, by implication, the proper targets for taxation). The attached file presents four graphs using the same data to depict the income distributions four different ways. This way, people can pick their preferred tax policy and then select the graph that supports their pick. No need for data to constrain your policy prescriptions!
Spin it baby spin it!