States often classify their bills by broad subjects, such as health, or education, or crime, etc. We recently added this information to our site, and I realized that haven’t done a series of word clouds for a while. Two facts that lead to on conclusion: we should look at what bills are about, according to how the states classify them by subject.
First, a look at all the bills introduced in 2013 across all the states:
It’s not too surprising that Budget, Spending, and Taxes is the biggest category, is it? But there’s a whole lot of “other”. Perhaps some of those items really are new, and will get their own subjects assigned. I actually heard an interesting statistic recently: 15% of all Google searches every day are new (have never been searched for before). The world is always changing…
Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to compare some different states, particularly states we think of as different from each other. Let’s start with word cloud just for New York:
This actually looks pretty similar to what the overall picture is. Ok. But how about Texas?
Hmmm, that’s interesting. The number of Resolutions just dwarfs the other topics. I did another cloud, removing resolutions from consideration:
What jumps out at me is that Education is a more dominant topic in Texas then in other places.
And now let’s look at what the picture is for just federal legislation:
I guess it’s no surprise that Foreign Trade, Tariffs, and National Security show up the federal level and not at the state level. It’s still surprising to see how small “Taxation” is. Maybe there’s other things in this particular word cloud that surprise you?
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