
The Greater Recession of 2020 grinds on.
And, serious negotiations over next round stimulus have apparently stalled again over state and local fiscal relief, among other matters, despite the blunt warnings of of Fed. Chairman Jay Powell, et al about the likely "tragic consequences of delay." My own cup of frustration about this latest manifestation of economy killing legislative and Presidential gridlock runneth over. And it's gotten me thinking again about the past, when Congress and the Executive had the wise analysis and deliberate work of the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) at their disposal. (And because many in Congress and the Executive branch didn't want to hear what ACIR had to say, dispose of ACIR is what they did in 1996).
Remember when we students of fiscal federalism thought that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and other reforms of the time were serious enough unfunded mandates imposed on state and local government that, after decades of debate, the Congress passed UMRA, the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995?
Governors and local government leaders should put the federal government's current failure so far to compensate states and localities for their non-recoverable tax and fee revenue losses resulting from their pandemic control actions taken pursuant to federal guidelines at the top of their list of unfunded mandates. Maybe it would even be grounds for the mother of all unfunded mandate suits. If the federal government doesn't reimburse the states and localities for their non-recoverable tax and fee revenue losses, state and local tax/fee rates will have to go up.
And since the private sector had at least as much to do with the consideration and passage of UMRA - and the private sector damages from the pandemic control actions - and from the coming state and local tax increases - are of way greater magnitude, maybe service leaders would join in such a judicial action.

Of course UMRA is pretty toothless as all it actually does is "...provide a framework for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to estimate the direct costs of mandates in legislative proposals to state and local governments and to the private sector, and for issuing agencies to estimate the direct costs of mandates in proposed regulations to regulated entities," according to the Congressional Research Service's (CRS's) excellent summary.
But still, at least to make the point, and as another way to focus more public attention on the extraordinary crisis in America's intergovernmental fiscal system, maybe such a suit should be pursued.
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