Established to help state through volatile economic times, $9.4 billion set-aside will be at the center of Legislature's budget debate.

A lawmaker who co-chairs the Idaho Legislature's budget writing panel says she is troubled by a proposed one-time transfer of $10 million from the permanent building fund to help balance the state budget next year.

AFter skipping payments last year, the governor now wants to shore up the retirement fund. To do so, however, he proposes dipping into money the state is giving to localities affected by changes in education funding

While Gov. Dan Malloy used his first executive order Wednesday to begin whipping Connecticut's finances into shape, state legislators warned they aren't ready to go cold turkey when it comes to budget gimmicks.

As Gov. Butch Otter prepares the next state budget, he'll have fewer places to look to other than state tax revenues to fund the government. As the economy fizzled, the governor and lawmakers turned to federal stimulus dollars and reserve accounts to balance the budget, but both those options are largely off the table for the next round of budget planning

Gov. Mitch Daniels and Indiana lawmakers preparing to craft the state's next two-year budget are eyeing an obscure bank insurance fund as a possible revenue source to close anticipated budget gaps.

The party started fighting back against the notion that Gov. McDonnell successfully steered an austere budget through the General Assembly this year in an organized way, pointing to a report in last week's Richmond Times Dispatch about warnings from the board that manages the Virginia Retirement System about the state's chronic underfunding of employee pensions.

More than $25 billion from tobacco settlements and taxes will be collected by states across the country this year. Only 2 percent of that will be spent on tobacco prevention and cessation program.

For years, trickery and quick fixes have just fed the spending habit. Today the budget holes are cavernous.

In its struggles to deliver balanced state budgets over the past 10 years, Colorado has amassed $3.7 billion in obligations that it may never pay.  State budget analysts told the Legislature's Joint Budget Committee in November that the 2011-2012 budget, with an anticipated $1.1 billion shortfall, no longer includes the $3.7 billion cut over the years.  This was the first year budget analysts even tried to add up the cost of these potential obligations, and they acknowledged the total figure is impossible to know until lawmakers decide what they think should be repaid.

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.