This is the first of several sets of posts intended to be rolled out over the next few weeks (the traditional summer slow season for political writing, though that will hardly be the case in RI this year!), related to issue discussions that will hopefully occur during the 2010 campaign.
For starters, here is a short history of the recent growth in the Rhode Island state budget. Data was compiled from two sources: the RI Department of Administration’s Budget Office, for fiscal years 1998 to 2009, and this year’s “enacted budget” document from the legislature, for fiscal years 2010 and 2011.
This first graph is total budget amounts, from all sources in terms of “current dollars” (meaning the actual dollar amount spent in that fiscal year), broken down by the state’s official major categories for its spending…

Current dollars do not take into account purchasing power changes due to inflation. Consumer Price Index data by month, which can be used as an estimate of inflation and can be used to adjust the sepdning data across time, is available the State Department of Labor and Training website. Using FY2010 as the base year, I adjusted prior year totals upward (because of positive inflation rates) and assumed a small positive inflation rate for the current fiscal year, to create a set of inflation-adjusted spending figures
The results show that the growth in government spending has exceeded the rate of inflation, i.e. that government has steadily claimed more and more resources over the past decade…