Tag: budget shortfall

There is nowhere near enough money for Colorado to continue to do the business of the state as things stand, according to an influential team of researchers at the University of Denver. State lawmakers will either have to raise more money or cut away the kind of programs and services most Americans view as measures of the baseline quality of life achieved over centuries in the world's wealthiest nation.

Last year outspoken Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry boasted about his state's conservative approach to economics and its lean budget. He derided the budget messes faced by other states and blasted Democratic-controlled Washington, telling Tea Party crowds that lawmakers had abandoned the Founding Fathers' vision of limited government. He said President Obama's Washington was strangling Americans with taxing and spending. Tea Partiers waved signs criticizing Obama's $780 billion economic stimulus package. Perry later told reporters that Texans were getting so fed up that they might consider seceding from the Union. Then news came that, hidden under budgetary lipstick and rouge, Texas faced a major $18 billion budget shortfall-- as much as 20 percent of the state's next two-year budget. Today came news from the National Conference of State Legislatures that Perry's Texas took more federal stimulus money than any other state in the country. In fact, Texas plugged 97 percent of its budget shortfall last year with Obama stimulus cash.

EAGLE -- Gov. Bill Ritter Thursday predictably touted his “New Energy Economy” as a way out of the current economic wilderness during an hour-long, town-hall-style meeting in Eagle, the Eagle County seat 30 miles west of Vail.