The Senate is still in proforma session as I write this but in reality they have left town without even trying to take action on another round of pandemic fiscal relief, ignoring the best advice of the vast majority of the nation's macro-economists who have been trying mightily to educate both house of Congress and the White House about what happened when decision-makers took their feet off the stimulus gas peddles during the recovery from the milder 2008 "Great Recession."
So as the Wall Street Journal headlined today "U.S. States Face Biggest Cash Crisis Since the Great Depression," a pretty good round-up of anecdotal info from various places supporting the headline's not-inappropriately alarming headline by Heather Gillers and Gunjan Banerji. Among other terrible findings is this one, that the $434 billion in state budget shortfalls projected by Moody's Analytics from 2020 through 2022 in the absence of no further fiscal stimulus from the federal level is "...greater than the 2019 K-12 education budget for every state combined, or more than twice the amount spent that year on state roads and other transportation infrastructure, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers."
The piece includes several terrific info-graphics, but the one that caught and held my attention the longest was the following:
Clearly, the pain is not limited to those places that are controlled by D Governors who are accused without reasonable foundation of being "mismanaged" because their rainy day funds weren't big enough. Hello Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, and Ohio!
And now it's becoming clearer how this situation is impacting the nation's leading public transit agency, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and how those impacts will echo through the New York metropolitan economy. The New York Times piece by Christina Goldbaum summarized the findings of a Rudin Center for Transportation study neatly in its headline: "M.T.A. Slashes in Service Could Erase 450,000 Jobs".
As the Greater Recession of 2020 rolls on so too do of the direct consequences of partisan gridlock in the Senate.
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