Reply #9: Which explains perfectly why

[Igel]

teacher staffing and education, a state issue, is being cut most heavily in Democratic controlled states (for the most part). It's because the repubs control them. :think:

At some point the facts really do have to stop spinning so that they can be observed.

Moreover, there's another point that's relevant here: Legislative budgeters have IQs under 20--by definition, since that's essentially what legislators require. The kinds of assumptions they make are geared to produce overreactions when there's a change in income levels and underreactions when income is fairly flat. The previous year is what all future years are like: If we have increased income, we can plan for increased income every year for the next 20. If we have decreased income, we must plan for decreased income every year for the next 20. The only curve that can exist in the future is a straight line, whatever the curve for past income levels might have been.

Take the Clinton surplus. It wasn't huge, and the assumption in 2000 was that the growth rate would essentially be as high in 2000 as it was in 1999, that it would be as high in 2001 as it was in 2000, and as high in 2002 and 2003 as it was in 2001 and 2002. However there was a recession in 2001--and that eliminated the surplus immediately. Then there was a stimulus package of sorts--now considered to be okay when there's a recession--but that also would have wiped out the surplus because it was a tax cut (additionally it wasn't a single year's lump expenditure). Then there was additional military spending. Yet the fundamental fallacy in talking about the trillion dollars or so in the Clinton "surplus" was the uberconservative assumptions that went into budgeting forecasts. The first factor--the recession, likely at some point by defined away by the tyranny of the straight edge in forecasting models--is completely sufficient.

It's likely that next fall states will realize that their tax revenues are increasing and after shouting doom and gloom, legislators will again engage in that horribly politicized process called "buy the votes"--what forbids legislators from producing savings accounts, from not making routine, on-going spending take up every last cent of the tax revenues garnered in boom times.