state budget woes result from far too much spending

Some interesting/useful numbers from the Reason Foundation's Michael Flynn and Adam Summers in Reason...

Of the $787 billion in “stimulus” money Barack Obama authorized with his presidential pen on February 17, at least $144 billion was earmarked for a particularly unstimulating purpose: covering the budget deficits of state governments....

“Gov. Sanford says that he does not want to take the money, the federal stimulus package money,” Schwarzenegger told ABC’s This Week on February 21. “And I want to say to him: I’ll take it. I take it because we in California…need it.”

But does California, or any other state, really “need” federal money during this economic downturn? Only if you accept the premise that state budgets should roughly double every decade....

When Gray Davis, a Democrat, became California’s governor in 1999, the state’s budget was $75 billion. Tempted by dot-com windfalls and beholden to public-sector unions, Davis bumped that number to $104 billion in four short years of boom and bust, after which he was bounced out of office for his fiscal irresponsibility and replaced by a Milton Friedman–quoting action hero who promised to bring “fiscal sanity” back to Sacramento. Five years later...Schwarzenegger had hiked the budget to an astonishing $145 billion....

One good way to measure fiscal stewardship is to see whether state spending growth exceeds the rate of population growth plus inflation....

Fire up Google, pick almost any year, and you’ll find plenty of stories about a “fiscal crisis” around the nation. For decades statehouses have followed a predictable schedule. In good economic times, they collect a lot more tax revenue than they really need. But instead of giving the money back to taxpayers or putting it in a rainy day fund, they pretend the good times will never end. When the good times do inevitably come to a close, governors plead poverty and either ask the federal government for help or raise taxes on their beleaguered citizens. Eventually, the economy rebounds and the vicious cycle starts again....

In the five years between 2002 and 2007, combined state general-fund revenue increased twice as fast as the rate of inflation, producing an excess $600 billion. If legislatures had chosen to be responsible, they could have maintained all current state services, increased spending to compensate for inflation and population growth, and still enacted a $500 billion tax cut.

Instead, lawmakers spent the windfall. From 2002 to 2007, overall spending rose 50 percent faster than inflation....