My question is how did the state legislature re-direct all these funds over the past 20-30 years? Surely revenues per capita are higher than in the 80's.
The Legislature voluntarily reduced the state's two largest revenue sources - income tax and gross production tax.
They further eroded their ability to direct remaining funding to areas of need by creating huge off the top earmarks for a variety of purposes. I will say that the transportation one has been effective in making our roads and bridges less of a national embarrassment.
They also made it nearly impossible to take corrective action in the event of a revenue disaster by passing a ballot proposal that requires 75 percent approval of the Legislature to raise taxes.
Around 2009 it should have been clear that this was leading us to calamity, but to delay accountability, we at this time began to rely on various sources of one time funding to fill the revenue hole - federal stimulus dollars, the rainy day fund, and an ongoing shell game using agency revolving funds.
Over this period, state agencies saw their budgets reduced, reduced and reduced until some had lost upwards of a third of their employees, in order to allow the Legislature to approve balanced budgets.
Now we have arrived at the point where there are simply no gimmicks left, and faced with hard decisions, the Legislature has simply proven that it has failed to govern, failed to competently manage the state's finances, and lacks the ability to fix the problem. What you are seeing at the Capitol right now is total system failure.
*edit - I completely forgot to note the hundreds of millions in tax credits we adopted over this period, most without adequate oversight to prove that the Legislature was actually getting a return on its investment.
