Patrick Gibbons, a researcher-analyst at the Nevada Policy Research Institute (NPRI), has a new piece up.
It’s worth the read if you want to (1) understand where Nevada REALLY is with its budget issues, (2) be informed about the questions that remain unanswered, and (C) be reminded that when it comes to politics and money, the devil is always in the details.
Gibbons points out that depending on which newspaper, pundit or politician you believe, you might think Nevada has a budget shortfall of $5.6 billion, $4.5 billion, $2.5 billion, $1.2 billion – or no real shortfall at all. And so you might think we need to cut between 34% and 0% of the budget in order to cover the shortfall.
The questions are: Who is right, and what accounts for the differences in math? And how can the public (or our elected officials) have intelligent policy discussions if we can’t even agree on the basis basics?
In order to wade through it all, one first needs to understand that the General Fund (GF) is not the same as the total state budget. In fact, the GF makes up only 37.5% of the overall budget. The recommendation for the General Fund for the current biennium (FYI: we do our state budgets two years at a time, if you didn’t know that) was $5.8 billion, but the overall recommendation for the state budget was $18 billion.
The other thing to know (ask!) when talking about either the General Fund or the overall state budget is whether people are extrapolating their numbers from (1) the originally projected and appropriated sums or or the currently projected sums, and (2) ditto on the revenue.
Read the NPRI piece and see for yourself!
(And if you have any questions, submit them here and we’ll see if we can get Patrick to stop by and explain things.)
