Blog

Annual vs. Biennial Budgeting

In March, the Pew Center on the States and the Rockefeller Institute of Government released a study on revenue estimating in the states.  They found that in 2009, the errors by states in forecasting personal income, sales, and corporate income tax collections added up to a $49 billion unexpected revenue shortfall. Additionally: In the states […]

Pew on Public Pensions

This week the Pew Center on the States put out a report on state pensions and retiree health care costs.  Pew finds that the gap between the promises states made for employees’ retirement benefits and the money they set aside to pay for them grew to at least $1.26 trillion in fiscal year 2009, resulting […]

New Brief: For Human Services, Cuts All Around

A policy brief from last week, So Close and Yet So Far Away, gave an overview of the spending plans and balance sheets of the House- and Senate-passed 2011-13 budgets.  It also promised more details on a few key budget areas. The first of these additional briefs provides a comparison of spending on human services […]

Regulatory Overlap in Washington

Today the latest Thrive Washington paper was released: Confronting Washington State’s Overlapping Regulatory Structures. Regulatory reform efforts are being undertaken in numerous states and in the federal government.  As President Obama said in the Wall Street Journal, “Sometimes . . . rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business–burdens that have stifled […]

Barone on the "death of the 'defined benefit'"

Last week, we published a brief on reforming public pensions. It’s timely, then, to link to Michael Barone’s column on the last days of the defined benefit pension. This sounds right: Defined benefit policies assume a static society. But we live in a dynamic society, and defined benefit policies cannot keep up with constant change. […]

What's wrong with the NLRB complaint against Boeing's S. Carolina expansion

Plenty. We’ve spent at lot of time at the WRC looking business decision-making and considering how public policies shape the competitive environment for employers. A fundamental premise: Investors and employers have choices. Last week, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against the Boeing Company, alleging that the decision to open a second 787 […]

New WRC Policy Brief Comparing House and Senate Budgets

We have posted a Policy Brief (So Close and Yet So Far Away) comparing balance sheets and high-level spending plans for the House and Senate budgets.

A Tax Preference is Not a Loophole

TaxVox (the blog of the Tax Policy Center) has a good post today on tax “loopholes.”  The author, Eric Toder, is responding to the faulty yet widespread use of “loopholes” as a synonym for “tax expenditures” at the federal level, but it certainly corresponds to the debate here in Washington as the legislature considers the […]

Moderate Democrats get workers' compensation reform bill moving again

Yesterday’s move by moderate Democrats in the House to amend the bipartisan workers’ compensation reform bill passed by the Senate has revived prospects for legislative success in the waning days of the legislative session. This is an issue the Research Council has followed closely for a long time. Most recently, we published The Time Has […]

New Brief: Reforming Public Pensions

In Reforming Public Pensions, we look at the current state of Washington’s public pension system and the methods of calculating unfunded liabilities in these plans.  The good news is that Washington is in much better shape than most other states.  The bad news is that all states are probably understating their unfunded liabilities by assuming […]