I wonder if stlhd gets tired of always being wrong...


$8 billion shortfall forecast for Washington state budget
A preliminary state revenue forecast on Thursday pushed Washington's state budget shortfall to $8 billion. As a proportion of the state's general fund, that's about as bad as the mess in California.

By Andrew Garber

Seattle Times Olympia bureau

Related

Arun Raha's speech notes
OLYMPIA — It used to be lawmakers could reassure themselves a little about the state's budget woes by noting California was in much worse shape.

No longer. A preliminary state revenue forecast Thursday pushed Washington's state budget shortfall to $8 billion. As a proportion of the state's general fund, that's nearly as bad as the mess in California.

"What has happened in the Pacific Northwest is the economy just fell off a cliff in literally the last few months," said Donald Boyd, with the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York.

Washington ranks among the top 10 states in the country in terms of the size of its budget shortfall, said Boyd, a senior fellow at the institute who closely monitors state budgets.

Washington state forecasters had previously projected a nearly $6 billion shortfall. Thursday's preliminary forecast shows an additional $721 million gap in the current two-year budget and $1.6 billion more in the next biennium that starts in July. That pushed the overall shortfall to $8 billion.

"Everything we feared could go wrong, did," Arun Raha, the state's chief revenue forecaster, said Thursday. "We are witnessing an unprecedented economic crisis, the likes of which arguably we have not seen since the Great Depression."

The Legislature recently took the first step at filling the crater by approving a series of early cuts expected to save about $580 million in the current two-year budget.

The state expects to get billions of dollars in aid from the federal stimulus package passed by Congress, but the governor's budget office said the additional money will at best offset the latest round of bad news in the revenue forecast. Additional cuts may be needed beyond what's already been proposed by Gov. Chris Gregoire.

California lawmakers approved a large package of tax increases, budget cuts and borrowing Thursday to close a $42 billion gap in their budget. As a proportion of that state's overall budget, California's shortfall is not much larger than Washington's.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008765126_revenue20m.html