Even in dour economic days, piecing together a $70-billion state budget for Florida required a sprinkling of special projects to appease powerful politicians.

Democratic leaders throughout the Legislature are pushing the delay of hundreds of million dollars in payments as a solution to the state's budget deficit.

Despite the relative obscurity of "service" taxes to the populace, nearly every state taxes some services and are very crafty about finding new ones to tax.

Time is running out on a tax plan at the state Capitol as majority Democrats try to wrap up work on a $1 billion budget gap and end their 60-day session by March 8.

House Democrats have proposed bridging the state budget gap largely by delaying certain school payments and making more than $400 million in spending cuts.

The chairman of the Legislative Budget Board John O'Brien told Texas lawmakers that they did not appropriate enough to cover state expenses for Medicaid and other programs. The state is short more than $4.1 billion in the current budget.

The payment falls, at a time most pension costs are rising, because a $404 million payment to CalPERS for California State University pensions is shifted from the state budget to CSU.

A $700 million bond sale in November is among a number of accounting measures Republicans and other critics are questioning as exactly the kind of fiscal gimmicks Mr. Malloy had vowed to end when he took office last year.

Two states have already announced that they won't be using all of their share of the $25 billion allocated in Thursday's historic foreclosure settlement to pay its intended recipients -- the homeowners and borrowers who saw the housing market collapse beneath their feet.

House Democrats are thinking of going into debt to help plug the big $1.5 billion hole in the state budget, a scheme that could eliminate the need for the Legislature's much-talked-about plan to go the voters for a tax increase.

Was the slow recovery of the U.S. economy from the trough of the Great Recession anticipated? 

Alternative views on the problem the United States is facing: financing retirement consumption as its population ages.

State finances are not transparent and often include hidden liabilities as well as rapidly growing responsibilities which are difficult to control.  While state revenues are gradually recovering from the drastic decline of the Great Recession, they are not growing sufficiently to keep pace with the spending required by Medicaid costs, pensions, and other responsibilities and obligations.  This has resulted in persistent and growing structural deficits in many states which threaten their fiscal sustainability.

Because many states do continue to rely on the gimmicks, SBS tracks what financial games the states are playing.  The gimmicks are many and varied.  This is an overview of many of the gimmicks that states have recently used.

State Budget Solutions' second annual state deficit report reveals aggregate state debt presently exceeds $4 trillion. While states themselves can rely on budget gimmicks to hide the extent of the deficit, SBS takes a straightforward approach to calculating total state debt. See where your state ranks.

This paper examines the fiscal health of the 50 U.S. states. As this paper shows, accounting for implicit pension liabilities provides a significantly more negative picture than does explicit debt information on its own.

Gov. Malloy has proposed dozens of tax increases across 25 categories of taxes. This is a conservative count; we aren't counting each separate expansion of the sales tax as a separate tax hike, though of course they are.

Both the decision to raid special funds and the revelation that several may have excess balances or be obsolete provokes one to ask, "Just how many special funds are there, and what is their total in excess balances?" This paper aims to create a starting point for answering that question and to provoke policymakers and taxpayers alike to support a complete audit and publication of all Hawaii State funds - not just special funds - for the purposes of transparency and accountability in government.

There is no government or private sector budget with items labeled "government waste," or "junket" or "fraud and abuse." When the Idaho Freedom Foundation began reviewing state and local government records in search of waste, elected officials and bureaucrats claimed that there is very little to discover--that with the recession and cost-cutting measures at all levels of government, there's no room for frills. As it turns out, that was hardly the case, and no one should be surprised.

This chart shows thatstates have closed $169 billion in budget gaps and that a $127 billion gape remains. This is, however, overstated.  It is important to get the total spending in each state. In some cases, the legislature may cut general fund spending but use money from other funds.  It is also important to consider borrowed money and federal funds, whjch can result in an increase in spending.  In many cases the "closed budget gaps" is the difference between what governors wanted to spend and the revenue forecast and is not the current budget versus the previous budget.  Total general fund spending and total all funds spending for last budget must be compared with the current budget and next years' budget.

State Budget Solutions recommends that state legislators take action in 2013 to resolve the serious state financial crises by changing their focus from inputs to outcomes by redesigning budgets from the ground up based on priorities and performance.

States should use the budget solutions of avoiding budget gimmicks and use any additional revenue to first eliminate all the dubious financial devices from budgets and to avoid state debt.

The Citizens' Budget includes legislative, constitutional, and policy recommendations to close the looming state budget gap - without raising taxes - and move Colorado towards sustainable government for good.

While several improvements have been made to bring Florida's tradition of "Government in the Sunshine" into the 21st Century, it seems appropriate that the year that marked the anniversary of the beginning of Florida's tradition of "government in the sunshine" also became the year in which
Florida took an important leap towards living up to its nickname of the "Sunshine State," particularly in the area of government finance.

To reestablish Illinois as an economic powerhouse, the Institute has proposed "Budget Solutions 2012," an alternative that does not rely on the state's recent tax hikes as a revenue source, does not include borrowing and has positive cash flow for fiscal year 2012 - all while funding core services the poor and disadvantaged rely upon.

Case study of New Jersey's five public pension plans and exploration of possible solutions, including shifting all newly hired employees to a defined contribution pension model based upon the plan already offered to New Jersey's university employees and continuing current reforms lowering pension replacement rates and, if possible, extended to current employees.

Many governors and state legislators are using accounting gimmicks and federal stimulus funds to temporarily balance their budgets. When federal funds run out in a year or two, these states will face a spending cliff, necessitating a significant downsizing of their state budgets.

In a period when financial markets and institutions have appeared near collapse, the accounting methods used by public employee pensions effectively ignore risk. These accounting methods, which are used by public pensions in Arizona and around the country, allow pension fund managers to assume that high returns can be earned through stocks and other investments without taking any market risk. As a result, the true market value of Arizona pension shortfalls that must be funded by taxpayers is understated by around half of what the pension funds have reported.

This paper establishes a basic framework that can be used to assess long-running fiscal practices in the states against a standard of fiscal prudence.