Turn Out The Lights, The Party's Over

For profligate, union thugocractic state governments across the country, Red Barry's tab has finally run out (via Newsmax Insider):

To close more than $400 billion in budget shortfalls, states have resorted largely to spending cuts, tax increases, and borrowing over the past four years.

But as governors and state legislatures prepare to write their budgets for fiscal 2012, they are “bracing themselves for what is likely to be the hardest year yet in what already has been the most difficult budget period in modern history,” according to Stateline, the news service of the Pew Center on the States.

State revenues have been up recently, but they dropped so deeply in 2008 and 2009 that it could take years for states to return to pre-recession levels. Also, the federal stimulus program, which helped states narrow budget gaps, is expiring just as healthcare costs are rising.

The dire prospects for 2012 are compelling state leaders to contemplate moves that “were once considered unthinkable,” Stateline reported.

• Maryland faces a budget shortfall of as much as $1.6 billion and may cut education spending and lay off government workers for the first time.

• New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to take the politically unpopular step of scaling back his state’s Medicaid program.

• South Carolina will stop paying for hospice care for the poor.

• California Governor Jerry Brown is arguing for the broad-based tax increases that voters overwhelmingly rejected two years ago.

• Georgia may begin applying the sales tax to groceries, despite legislation passed fifteen years ago repealing the grocery tax.

• In Oregon, officials are considering cuts to pension benefits for current and future public employees.

Overall state tax revenue has grown over three consecutive quarters and economists expect economic growth in 2011.

But Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, said the growth masks the reality that states are dealing with.

“You might have some ridiculously high-sounding revenue growth but that’s because the base is so low,” Pattison told Stateline.

“I’ve been telling a lot of people, ‘Compare the budget totals to pre-recession levels, because that’s a better measure. Don’t assume happy days are here again.’”

By "happy days" is meant the Big Labor-propelled Roman orgyistic bread & circuses that set these state governments up for such a precipitous fall in the first place, which they've only temporarily averted through Hogzilla and its misbegotten progeny. The piper can only be stalled so long, and he's coming to collect.

In case you were keeping score above, Maryland, New York, South Carolina, and especially Oregon are "getting it," while Moonbeam and the GOP regime in Georgia are still out to lunch. Given the partisan leanings of these respective states, the irony is as abundant as their fiscal cupboards are bare. But then, you know the old Autolite jingle: "You can pay me now....or pay me later."

Almost makes the looming debate over a bankruptcy chapter for states academic, really. The day of reckoning is coming, and it's going to hurt; the only question up for grabs is how much we're going to minimize the pain.

And, of course, which states try to pass on the pain instead and dig themselves even deeper.

[cross posted @ Hard Starboard]