Summary

Creation Technique

General steps

1. Compile data from list of budget items at wikipedia:2009 United States federal budget and save to a file (e.g. "2009expenditures.csv");
2. Load data in R (programming language);
3. Load the ggplot2 library;
4. Assign the categorical variable (outlay) as a factor;
5. Plot using the ggplot.

Compiling the data

1. Compile the data into columns: one column for the budget expenditure (e.g. "Social Security," "Medicare," etc.) and the other for the amount ("644," "408," etc.).
2. Name the columns "Expenditure" and "Billions" for the expenditure category and the amount (in billions of U.S. dollars), respectively.
3. Save the data as comma-separated value file (csv).

R code to produce chart

# Load the ggplot2 library
library("ggplot2")

# Data saved using European separators ("." for thousands and "," for decimals), so use read.csv2().
# If data is saved using U.S. separators ("," for thousands and "." for decimals), use read.csv().
my.data <- read.csv2("2009expenditures.csv")

# Ensure that the categories are treated as factors
my.data <- data.frame(Billions = my.data$Billions, Expenditure = factor(my.data$Expenditure))

# Plot using ggplot2
ggplot(data = my.data, aes(Billions)) +
      geom_point(aes(y=reorder(Expenditure, Billions))) +
      xlab("Billions of U.S. Dollars") + ylab("")

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