How large could the shortfall in state government general revenues be, amidst the coronavirus and related crises? 

Truth in Accounting has released a new report on the 10 largest U.S. cities. The City Combined Taxpayer Burden report analyzes the finances of each city, its county, state, and underlying government units.

Correlation is not causation, they say, but ...

Today I realized that our debt clock was moving too slowly. I had to increase the debt clock by hundreds of billions to match how much the Treasury is currently borrowing. In April, the reported debt increased by $1.2 trillion dollars to almost $25 trillion.

Some fun with text analysis, and the annual Financial Report of the U.S. Government.

An infographic that shows where the federal government is getting the cash to pay for the stimulus package. 

Let's hope the real fiscal challenge doesn’t threaten students, and the rest of us, more than it already is.

The Federal Reserve loans will financially set these governments further back for a long time, if not forever. To pay back this new debt, governments will have to run true surpluses. Before the current crisis, only ten of the states had run annual surpluses that have enabled them to amass money available to pay future bills.

States and cities gain more direct access to central bank financing.

Click here to view our report on the nation's fiscal health before the coronavirus pandemic hit. 

The widely-followed estimate for total payroll employment fell by 701,000 jobs, a massive one-month decline that significantly exceeded analyst expectations.

If a city has more police officers will its crime rates be lower? Or if a city has more police officers does that mean that it has more crime than other cities? Does the amount of police officers in a city correlate with lower or higher crime rates?