State Governments Deal with Their Own Budget Crises

This post was originally published on the Public Notice: Bankrupting America Blog.

While many state governments worked up until their budget deadlines to avert a shutdown, divided government added another hurdle in many efforts to close funding shortfalls.

In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie (R) and the Democratic-held Legislature engaged in a level of partisan bickering exceeded only by the wrangling between Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) and that state’s Republican-held Legislature.

By overcoming its partisan disagreements, New Jersey will have a 29.7 billion dollar operating budget next fiscal year. As reported by CBS New York, this comes after Gov. Christie utilized several line-item vetoes to strip nearly 1 billion dollars from the budget sent to him Wednesday by Democrats in the legislature.

Although voters in the Garden State have representatives who fulfilled their duty, those in Minnesota are not as fortunate. As covered by Politico, their state government  is currently shutdown after politicians were unable to bridge the remaining 1.4 billion dollar political divide in a 5 billion dollar deficit.

As Washington continues to debate raising the debt ceiling, let’s hope that our own divided government lives up to its responsibility to cut spending and put America’s economy back on track.