State Fiscal Crisis: The Slideshow
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) compiles grim statistics into a slideshow demonstrating just how bad state economies and revenue streams are right now. These pretty pictures depict an especially ugly situation.
As state governments shed jobs and teachers prepare for layoffs, it’s very hard to see how most states and localities can come through this in the absence of a decent shot of federal assistance. Without short-term help and in the face of regional calamities like the ongoing oil spill, the country could re-enter recession. Paul Krugman writes today that this could lead America into a “deflationary trap” that we won’t soon recover from.
CBPP’s final slide offers a ray of hope: a few tax policies states could enact to lessen their pain as they await increasingly elusive (and, in any case, piecemeal) federal action.
