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If politology goes a bit quiet from time to time, it's usually going to be because I am working on some software to make politology cooler. I'm going to be doing that often on this site.

I've just finished a nice little tool to help everyone with their social security arguments, or perhaps just to help a little bit with education. It's a graphing tool to explore the social security budget. Right now it handles the history back through 1970, and projections up through 2080. It also allows you to see what past projections looked like so you can see how inaccurate they were. Here's an example graph:

But, that's just an example. You can go here to make your own graph - any year range, other projections, etc. You can then bookmark or link to the page for the graph you create, just by using the url in the url bar. For instance, here's 1970 through 2010.

The tool will be expanded over time. Soon there will also be a trust fund graphing tool. I'm hoping to show the "Low" and "High" projections as well. And over time I'll add other budgetary figures.

It creates a flash, so you can't simply copy the graph. You can always take a cropped screenshot, though. But I'm hoping to soon create code to allow you to embed the resulting flash into your own weblogs using javascript.

If you know of any cool data sources I could use, let me know - I'm interested in Bush's prior-year budget projections, for one thing. Those could be some entertaining graphs.

(The software utilizes a php software package that lets you create any number of cool looking graphs. But the data wrangling, formatting, and dynamic functionality is the part that I did.)