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“I’d like to assure you this nightmare will end. But I don’t see an end in sight.”
That’s precisely what you don’t want to hear from the state’s chief economist, Arun Raha. His new revenue forecast has blown a $1.4 billion hole in the state’s biennial budget, which was already packed with an abundance of suffering. And $1.4 billion is actually an understatement: The necessity of restoring a prudent reserve makes this a nearly $2 billion problem.
The only faint hope Raha offered was the possibility of a 4.4 percent revenue bump in 2013 – too far down the road to bank on, especially given the ringworm-like tenacity of this economic misery.