Expert Says Increased Revenue A Must

From AllVoices:

Arizona’s most prominent economist has announced that by his tally, it’s impossible to balance the $10.1 billion budget without new revenue – read: taxes – which the Republican-dominated legislature has fought for months.

Lawmakers refused even the Republican governor’s proposal to let voters approve or reject a temporary one-cent sales tax increase. Gov. Jan Brewer had to sue legislators to get them to send her budget bills last year. And under the state’s super-majority rule, it takes only 11 legislators to kill a tax bill.

Even so, a tax increase is possible because Arizona’s situation is so desperate, second only to California’s in severity, said Marshall Vest, an economist at the University of Arizona with 30 years experience observing the state legislature.

“I’ve learned that you just cannot predict what is going to happen,” he said. “Just about everything on the table is a kind of last resort.”

The Arizona constitution requires a balanced budget, but the funding from which legislators can cut is limited by federal and voter-approved mandates.

“The bottom line is, you could lay off every state employee and not begin to balance the budget,” Vest wrote in a December report. “You could entirely eliminate higher education and not come close. Ditto for welfare programs . . . and programs for children . . .”