By Larry DeDoer in the Jeffersonville News and Tribune:
July 11 was one of the great days on the number-crunching calendar. It was Indiana’s “close-out,” the day the Indiana State Budget Agency wraps up the numbers for the fiscal year.
And there’s no doubt, we’re in good shape. We took in more revenue than we spent in fiscal 2013, and we’ve got nearly $2 billion in the bank, which is a healthy 13 percent of the total budget.
We’re doing better than most states. The National Association of State Budget Officers collects budget information from all the states and ranks measures of “fiscal stress.” Indiana was one of 11 states in the “All Systems Go” category. Most of the Midwest was in the second-best category, “Holding Up,” while Kentucky was in the middle, “Could Be Better, Could Be Worse.” New Jersey and Georgia ranked lowest, in the dreaded “What Recovery?” category.
This is a huge turnaround from fiscal years 2009-11, when revenues fell short of the budget by $4.6 billion. Balances shrank to 6.7 percent of the budget in 2010, close to the 5 percent rock-bottom minimum.
How did we recover so fast?
Budgets are really pretty simple. You start the fiscal year with some balances in the bank. During the year, some revenues come in, some expenditures go out. You make a few adjustments, and you’ve got some balances left over at the end to start the next year. The way to increase balances is for more revenues to come in than expenditures go out. The budget recovered because more revenues came in, or fewer expenditures went out - or both.
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See the full article here:
http://newsandtribune.com/clarkcounty/x1938686129/DeBoer-Making-state-government-smaller
