Tomorrow's Wall Street Journal reports:
The stumbling U.S. economy is forcing states to slash spending and cut jobs in order to close a projected $40 billion shortfall in the current fiscal year.
That gap -- identified Wednesday in a survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures -- is more than triple the size of the previous year's. It is the result of broad economic weakness at the state and local levels that could cause pain throughout this year and into 2010. Sales-tax collections, for example, have been hurt by the housing slump and high gasoline prices, which are prompting cutbacks in consumer spending. Personal income-tax collections have been hit by rising unemployment, while corporate income-tax collections have been eroded by falling profits."We expect it to get worse before it gets better," said Corina Eckl, fiscal-program director of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Not to worry here at home. Governor Christine Gregoire and her staff continue to ignore the $2.7 billion deficit projections of the Senate Ways & Means Committee staff. Months have passed since the Governor's own Office of Financial Management released numbers to guide planning by the Governor's office.
Actually, come to think of it, they might not need the numbers since Gregoire isn't worrying about it for now:
She said her own budget office, the Office of Financial Management, hasn't done its own analysis and that she'll wait for the one it'll produce later this year (after the election) that she'll write her budget proposal off of. [Ed. note: "after the election," that's convenient.]
"That's the one that really counts," Gregoire said.She generally dismissed such talk of budget deficits, repeated what she's said before about deficit projections being merely projections and about the national economy dragging down Washington while expressing confidence in the state's economy."Now is not the time to panic," Gregoire said.
Maybe not panic, but public acknowledgment of reality and some actual planning by the state's chief executive to deal with a potentially massive budget shortfall sure sounds prudent.
Cross-posted at Sound Politics.
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