The statistics used in this article came from two different government sources. All information regarding Federal Taxes Paid vs. Federal Spending Received came from The Tax Foundation at http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/22685.html. In the PDF is a breakdown of each state per year. In order to find the average Federal Spending Received, I simply found the 25th ranked state in the given year and compared it to what Nevada received during that year.
All information regarding the state budget came from the Nevada Open Government website. http://open.nv.gov/OpenGov/ViewHomePage.aep. Using this data, I was able to compare the Governors Recommended Budget with Revenue and Spending. The Revenue and Spending page shows actual figures from 2006-2010. By comparing actual records of the Revenue and Spending to the Governors Recommended Budget, it is possible to see how a predicted budget matches up with actual outcomes.
All the graphs are my own original representations of the data provided.