Welcome to our charts and graphs page where I intend to post relevent visualization data that helps us understand important issues.  This week I am posting a few charts that show information regarding a very dangerous trend in Oregon, the growth in our state budget. In addition, we are adding more and more government jobs, while private sector jobs, especially in the last few year, are dropping off.

As you can see from the chart below, more than 4,300 state government jobs have been added to state payroll since November of 2007. In the same time period, 154,000 private sector jobs have been lost. These are two factors in the current budget shortfall the legislature will be facing in the 2011 session. Undoubtedly, some tough decisions lie ahead to bring our budget into balance and we need to reverse the trend of growing our state budget.

Please visit this page often. I will continue to post these charts with updated figures. The only chart that has seen significant changes in the last few months is the "Oregon's Private vs. Public Sector Job Trends."