About The Data Bulletin

The Data Bulletin shows the latest U.S. economic picture - jobs, prices, growth, housing, energy costs, crime trends - pulled straight from official sources and presented the moment new figures are released. You get the chart, the source, and a plain-English explanation of what it means.

The same promise extends beyond the U.S.: global climate and disaster data (storms, wildfires, disaster tolls) and human well-being measures (life expectancy, hunger, freshwater, child survival, homelessness), from the same kind of primary sources.

Every number on this site comes from an official primary source: FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the FBI Crime Data Explorer (Uniform Crime Reporting program), and the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Each chart links or names its exact series, so you can verify anything yourself in one click.

The States page draws on the U.S. Census Bureau's state government finance surveys (where each state's money comes from and goes), IRS Statistics of Income (who pays what share of income tax), and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's Who Pays study (taxes as a share of family income, by income group).

The climate and well-being sections draw on NOAA IBTrACS (the world's official tropical cyclone archive), NASA FIRMS (satellite wildfire detections), EM-DAT (the international disaster database at UCLouvain), the WHO Global Health Observatory, the World Bank (carrying UN FAO food and water series), and the OECD Affordable Housing Database. Where a measure is defined differently from place to place - homelessness counts, for instance, differ country to country - the definition sits next to the chart, not buried here.

Official figures are released on schedules (monthly, quarterly, weekly - not continuously), and agencies routinely revise past figures. We always display the latest official vintage.

The complete list of what the site can pull, and what is queued, is on the Full Data List.

If we ever get a number wrong, the correction is visible - never silent. The corrected figure is shown with its source, and the page says what changed.

Send corrections to contact@thedatabulletin.com.

The FBI itself warns against comparing states or cities by their crime rates - reporting practices, urbanization, and demographics differ too much for such lists to be fair. So we show trends and state-versus-national context instead. (Energy prices, by contrast, are designed to be compared across states - so there we compare away.)

Questions or corrections: contact@thedatabulletin.com.

The Data Bulletin is built and maintained by Micah McCaul, a data analyst. The story of why it exists is on his site.