January 4, 2005
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Topic: afternoon off
it’s 12:15pm, I’m in DC, i’m gonna go walk around for a bit.
Topic: policy things
“Those who support higher education should be the biggest chearleaders for health care reform.”
That’s from one of the guys I work with, who deals with state policy and higher ed. If I took a class on health care in school, there’s no doubt I wouldn’t have paid much attention, but, like an ever growing ice cream sunday, I keep finding new toppings to throw on my list of things to learn. This continues to prove, for me at least, that education is best when built around an individual, rather than build around a subject.
Something I learned that I didn’t know is that states are required to balance their budgets. They can’t simply go into debt like the federal government can. The origins, reasons, and implications of this I’m not all certain of yet. However, what this means is that states often have their hands tied by the limits of their tax revenues. So, when the federal government requires states to spend, the states are often unable to fund those mandates.
Comments (1)
To say that states are required to balance their budgets is really an untruth. A “balanced budget” would indicate that the amount coming in and the amount spent were the same, and this isn’t true for most states, which in the Clinton-era banked billions in surpluses, and now sell billions in bonds to pay for things now they can’t afford (roads, schools, water projects, et al). When states sell bonds they are doing the very same thing the feds do when they run deficits, it’s just that few states are allowed – by their own constitutions – to sell bonds expressly for operating budgets, like the feds do. This doesn’t mean that they don’t shidt everything they can to either capital budgets or to authorities, that can borrow, using tax revenue for day-to-day operations and debt service.