How to stretch our dollars
It was the next-to-last day of the 2008 legislative session. A news reporter had asked budget leaders from the Senate and House majorities about the sustainability of their plan to raise, to a record $33.7 billion, a state spending level that already had shot up 33 percent since 2004.
The response from one of my fellow Clark County legislators, who was then Senate budget vice chairman, included this candid and now-prophetic observation: If a significant economic slowdown were to occur, he said, state government would "struggle to balance its books."