"It’s the Revenues, Iowans"

[rurallib]

I have a good friend who works with the Iowa Policy Project. IPP was founded by former US senate candidate David Osterberg. They do analysis on Iowa policies. As one could guess, their analysis is usually 180degress off conventional wisdom. I found this recent analysis very enlightening.

FRIENDS:

It seems anyone who brings up the question of state revenues these days is shouted down. This doesn’t make much sense since revenues take up half of a ledger in a balanced budget, which is required for the state of Iowa.

A new report today from the Iowa Fiscal Partnership, The Revenue Roots of Iowa's State Budget Crisis, attempts to put some badly needed context back into the Iowa budget discussions. This brief report hits the key points about the reality of Iowa budgets over the last several years:
-- Spending is actually less as a share of the economy than it was in the 1990s, so evidence of a “spending problem” is pretty weak;
-- Revenues likewise have diverged from faster growth in the economy;
-- Iowa policy makers have constantly made choices that have exacerbated weaknesses in Iowa's revenue structure.

Simply put, many tax-cut choices in better economic times were short-sighted and have proven to be unsustainable.


http://www.iowafiscal.org/2009docs/090219-IFP-revs2.pdf
And here is a link to the news release:
http://www.iowafiscal.org/2009docs/090219-IFP-release.pdf

They have been in existence for about five years. Here is a link to their website. Great place for deep analysis of budgets, jobs and health care:
www.iowapolicyproject.org