Are you adjusting for inflation when comparing over time?

[derekeder]

When showing fiscal budgets over time, its a good idea to adjust for inflation to ensure apples to apples comparisons of spending. I looked through your code and didn't see any evidence that you were doing so.

A straightforward way to do this is to take the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and multiply your data by it for each year.

Here's a table of CPI: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/time.series/cu/cu.data.4.AsizeNorthCentral
Here's an R script we use to do the calculation: https://github.com/open-city/hows-business/blob/master/import/taxes.R