OPINION: Ryan McMaken - Thanks to Lockdowns, State and Local Tax Revenues Are Plummeting

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 Sunday, April 19, 2020 - 05:40
Pictured here at an April 2017 press conference vetoing the state budget, Gov. Jim Justice on March 23 issued a “stay-at-home” order restricting the movements of West Virginians to work, and travel deemed “essential.”
Pictured here at an April 2017 press conference vetoing the state budget, Gov. Jim Justice on March 23 issued a “stay-at-home” order restricting the movements of West Virginians to work, and travel deemed “essential.”

Thanks to government-coerced economic shutdowns—on top of the severe recession currently brewing—tax revenues are plummeting. And many governments are already expecting the hit to be larger than it was during the Great Recession.

These realities will put pressure on politicians to relax their social distancing rules in the hope that local taxpayers can again earn money and generate sales taxes in their jurisdictions. A failure to do so will mean layoffs for government employees and large cuts to government budgets.

Politicians may not care about your household budget or whether you have a job. But they care deeply about their government budgets and jobs for their friends.

This, perhaps more than anything else, will hasten moves by state and local politicians toward allowing the US economy to function again.

Read more at Mises Wire.

 

An economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014, Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.