The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning that Some States Get Stimulus Whether They Need or Want It.
A pot of money in Congress’s economic-stimulus bill is primarily intended to help buffer colleges and schools from state budget cuts. But some of the states slated to get the most money from that measure are not necessarily facing the greatest budget gaps or even proposing the sharpest reductions for higher education.
Arkansas, for example, is “not facing a revenue shortfall for this or even the next budget year, but it is still slated to receive $444.7-million from the state-stabilization fund. “Oklahoma will get nearly $579-million from the fund, even though the Sooner State’s revenue shortfall [is only] $309-million….”
So, the people of Arkansas and Oklahoma and the other 48 states will be transferring money to the Chinese in the form of interest payments so that the borrowed funds can be distributed to some states who managed their budgets well enough not to need it.
Meanwhile, we should all weep for Harry Reid’s Nevada since it will receive only $387.3 million from the fiscal stabilization fund even though it has run up “a budget gap of more than $1-billion for the next fiscal year, an amount equal to nearly 38 percent of the state’s general fund….”
But now that Happy Days Are Here Again (“the song is probably best remembered as the campaign song for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) successful 1932 Presidential campaign”) I’m sure that taxpayers all over the country (especially those in careful, well-run states) will be happy to go deeply into debt to rescue profligate states and their feckless politicians.
