state budgets
My Beautiful and Talented Wife (The BTW) and I have both been caught by speed cameras -- several times for each of us -- in recent years. So before you start screaming that I would feel differently if it had happened to me, please keep in mind that it has and my opinion is still the same.
This is all prompted by this story in The Washington Post about local celebrity chef Geoff Tracy being unhappy about being caught speeding three times by the cameras in his neighborhood. Note that Chef Geoff doesn't say that he wasn't speeding, only that he didn't like being caught and having to pay the fine.
I don't like paying fines either, but I do like it when a government does something efficiently and that's what speed cameras are: a highly efficient way to enforce existing law.
Via Powerline, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker gives a virtuoso performance in his press conference on his proposal to help close the state's budget deficit by reducing benefit costs for state employees:
This is an example of why I think governors have so much more credibility than senators when they seek the Presidency -- the best of them have a track record of taking responsibility for hard choices.
Happy New Year to everyone. I am happy to be back from my holiday blogging hiatus. And this week, I go back in the classroom to teach a course on local public policy. One of the biggest challenges facing states and localities at this moment is the underfunding of defined benefit pension plans for public sector workers. According to a recent editorial in The Christian Science Monitor (citing work by Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh):
By this spring, many states will run out of the $217 billion in stimulus money from Washington. (Illinois is already a deadbeat in paying bills.) Their budget woes will only mount as joblessness persists and politics prevents solutions in state houses.
Most of all, they face an estimated shortfall of $3.23 trillion owed to pension plans for current and retired state workers. Municipalities have an estimated $557 billion in pension liabilities. That adds up to about a quarter of the yearly US economic output.
My column from yesterday's Roll Call explains why...starting in 3 weeks...the dismal budget situation in the states is going to make the job of budget policymakers in Washington much more difficult.
States Point Way for Budget; Will Policymakers Listen?
June 8, 2010
The start of the federal fiscal year was changed from July 1 to Oct. 1 when the Congressional Budget Act was signed into law in 1974. This was a momentous change for federal budget policymakers who had to figure out what to do with the “transition quarter” — the three months between the end of the old fiscal 1976 and the beginning of the new fiscal 1977. But the new start date meant little for the states, and few changed their fiscal year as the federal government did. As a result, in about three weeks, fiscal 2011 will begin in 46 states.
