Times are tight here in (the other) Washington.
From the Governor's blog:
The magnitude and depth of this recession has made one thing clear — business as usual can no longer be the norm.
Our state faces a budget shortfall of historic proportions.
Often when financial crises hit, the magnitude of the crisis is well, magnified greatly by the rhetoric. Governments tend not to pay much attention when everything is going along just fine, spending every dime they can get like a drunken sailor on shore leave (all political parties - they just like to spend it on different stuff - remember how much the deficit went down under George W. Bush? - Ha!)
The following is a chart of the Washington state biennial budget for the last ten years and the upcoming projections:
CRISIS!!!!
The little blue line at the top right is the original budget proposed by the governor before we discovered that well, not that much money would be coming in. The crisis budget is still $2B more than the 2007-2009 biennium and only $2B less than the current biennium (or about 3%). So, as usual, the roughly $5B shortfall is only a reduction from the $3B increase that was planned.
Now, it's true that state budgets ought to be somewhat proportional to inflation and population growth. In the last 12 years, the state budget has outpaced inflation and population by 10%. The truth is there has always been enough money to do what the government needs to do, it's just that the government's appetite for new programs is pretty much insatiable. And once started they can't be stopped, because of the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" quid pro quo that is the nature of political horsetrading. Keep going and pretty soon you end up with taxation and government control like, say, France or England.
So really, the state budget "crisis" is nothing more than the government growth bubble bursting. Welcome to the real world, albeit a couple of years too late.
