Jim Fossel’s April 20 column, “It’s not just about Maine state spending, it’s about accountability,” uses absolute dollars as the basis for his claims, thus distorting the facts on the state budget.

He states that under Gov. Paul LePage, from 2010 to 2018, the budget “barely nudged upward” from $8 billion to $8.1 billion. During that period, using the Consumer Price Index (CPI), inflation was 15% cumulative, so in real dollars a “barely nudged” budget would be slightly over $9.2 billion. LePage’s budgets were, in real terms, a 13% decrease.

Gov. Mills’ increases have not yet gotten the state budget, in real dollars, back to where it was in 2010 based on the CPI, which would be closer to $12 billion. From 2010 on, health care and education inflation exceeded the CPI, and the state’s population grew as well, both requiring even higher levels of state spending.

We can all discuss, civilly, as we do in Maine, what the appropriate level of state spending should be, and the commensurate level of accountability for that spending. But accountability must come with the ability to count. This newspaper should ask its reporters and columnists, when citing numbers, to use real dollars and the principles of statistical significance as the basis for that discussion (no more reading scores were down 1% — the sky is falling). Otherwise, as the joke goes, the newspaper is using numbers as a drunk uses a lamppost — more for support than illumination.

Gerald Brown
Cape Elizabeth