Washington Post's Broder on the Governors' Fiscal Black Hole

From David Broder at the Washington Post:

As the nation's governors gather in Washington for their annual winter meeting, the states they lead are facing what one knowledgeable authority calls "a lost decade" of stagnant or declining revenue and budget crises.

Ray Scheppach, the man who used that phrase, has the credentials to call the situation "almost unprecedented." A veteran federal budgeteer, he has served as executive director of the National Governors Association for the past 27 years. In an interview just before the opening of this year's meeting, he told me that the most recent survey he'd conducted shows that "the states have not bottomed out yet; they're continuing to deteriorate. This year will probably be the worst for state budgets, and with the jobless recovery we're having, we're looking at a lost decade" before anything like normality returns.

For more, see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/19/AR2010021903045.html.