Hot Air » Blog Archive » Porkulus: Delaying the inevitable
Oh good. More Obama economic pain to look forward to.
Remember how Barack Obama and Joe Biden went around the country, claiming credit for saving the jobs of teachers, police officers, and firefighters with the Porkulus package? The one commonality between them: all of them are public employees whose salaries get paid or subsidized by the states. The state grants in the $797 billion stimulus package allowed states to paper over deficit spending in 2009 in order to save the jobs of bureaucrats, not police and firefighters, who were less likely to lose their jobs than SEIU-represented beancounters in state capitals.
Well, 2009 will soon turn into 2010, and guess what? All of that deficit spending by the states still hasn’t been addressed:
As states across the country grapple with the worst economy in decades, most have cut services, forced workers to take unpaid days off, shut offices several days a month and scrambled to find new sources of revenue.
The good news is that much of the pain this year has been cushioned by billions of dollars of federal stimulus money, which has allowed states and localities to avoid laying off teachers, prison guards, police officers and firefighters.
The bad news is that for the next fiscal year, beginning in July, the picture looks even bleaker. Revenue is expected to remain depressed, even if the national economy improves. There will be only half as much federal stimulus aid available, and many states have already used up their emergency reserves.
Most states have just approved a budget for the fiscal year that began July 1, and their legislatures have adjourned for the summer. But in a dozen or more states, those budgets have already gone into the red less than two months into the fiscal year, by a total of about $24 billion. More than 30 states are projecting deficits for next year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based think tank, and other expert estimates.
