Budget 2010: visualising the deficit mountain

The budget dominates the news today - as does Alistair Darling's efforts to tackle the growing deficit in public spending. The deficit is the government's running overdraft - the gap between what it has coming in and what goes out. To cover the deficit, the government has to borrow money, which is added on to the national debt - you can see the full data for that here . What's clear is that this financial year, the balance between incomings and outgoings every month is worse than in the previous financial year - but it is less than was feared. We wanted to show how much the government is in credit or debit each month - and how this financial year compares to the last. This is how we did it - click on the image above for the big picture. You can download a pdf here too . The full data from the ONS (combined with Treasury forecasts from yesterday) is below. The two do not entirely match - but they never do. What can you do with it? Download the data • DATA: download the full datasheet World government data • Search the world's government data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at [email protected] • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter Data summary