According to the Government Accountability Office, the current economic conditions that individual states are dealing with probably aren't going to improve anytime soon. In fact, the date they are now predicting is a mind-boggling 2060.
Personally, I don't think we can last another 10 years, let alone 50, unless we bury Reaganomics and put it behind us once and for all.
(Reuters) - The fiscal conditions of state and local governments will steadily decline through 2060 because of rising healthcare costs, a federal watchdog agency said on Wednesday, but it added that short-term pressures have eased over the last year.
"Although the sector's near-term fiscal picture has improved slightly since our March 2010 update, the economic downturn has created an unprecedented fiscal situation for states as revenues declined in tandem with the economy," the Government Accountability Office said in a report. [...]
"The decline in the sector's operating balance over time is primarily driven by rising health-related costs," it said.
Medicaid, the healthcare program for the poor that states operate with federal reimbursements, takes up about a third of state budgets. The Medicaid spending will likely grow as the federal healthcare plan encourages more people to enroll.
Paul Ryan's new Medicaid-crushing, path to poverty would see the conversion of Medicaid into a block-grant based system that dishes out a flat amount of money to the states for their expenses, and after those funds have dried up, the states would be on their own. Ryan's plan would also cap increases to grants at the rate of inflation which, as Ezra Klein points out, simply doesn't make sense in this universe.
Many states are already swinging an axe at their Medicaid budgets even under the current system, and they're still implementing gratuitous tax-cuts on top of it, so you can bet Paul Ryan's beltway-arousing budget could potentially render the entire system defunct. But that's the point isn't it?
Ultimately what lies on the other side of fully-realized, Republican economic policy is an insolvent, toxic soup of fiscal incoherence and moral bankruptcy. And the only thing standing between us and societal ruin are a handful of senators and President Obama. Consider that while calculating your various political gripes.