Reddit tends to be a highly liberal place, supporting the idea of higher taxes and more benefits as something good for society and the economy. While this is sometimes true it isn’t always. In particular, one person stated that Scandinavia’s high taxes and low corruption are indicative of a larger trend of high taxes correlating with less corruption. I wanted to explore this trend, especially since from my own knowledge, countries like Italy are renown for their incredibly high corruption, and certainly have higher taxes than the United States. While the sentiment seems nice, I couldn’t see this necessarily being true. Didn’t make enough sense so I did a simple investigation. The line drawn through is a linear regression but with very poor fit so it must be taken with a grain of salt.

As you can see, the conclusion they drew is not necessarily true. It looks almost wholly random and inconsistent. The narrative posed sounds nice but really needs investigation before it can be stated as fact. I used CPI from Transparency International and OECD Tax Wedge information from the OECD Taxing Wages paper. This was then compiled in Excel for a quick and dirty visualization.

Afterwards I posted it on reddit, which was somewhat received well by the DataIsBeautiful subreddit and gave me some valuable input on visualization design.