This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, February 22nd, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown. Just shy of a year ago, one of the predicted effects of the massive declines in employment that followed the

arrival of COVID-19, a dramatic decline in state revenues, but in many states that

simply hasn't happened. Logan Colas of the Buckeye Institute and Chris Edwards of Cato comment on why the

massive spending shortfall simply never materialized.

Chris, I want to start with you. We were told in March and April, massive collapse in state-level revenues. What happened?

Well, the state budget situation turned out a lot better than a lot of the

mainstream media was projecting. There was a lot of scare newspaper headlines early

in the crisis that it was an

apocalypse with state and local government revenues. I was very skeptical the

whole time when I blogged about this early on because I went and back and looked at the

Great Recession a decade ago and the loss of

revenues a decade ago is not very much in fact local governments cities and counties

a decade ago didn't lose any money overall because they mainly relied on

property tax revenues and the same thing has happened this this time is that property tax

revenues are actually rising so cities are doing very well.

Property tax revenues are three quarters of local government revenues, they've continued to do well.

So just to give you the overall numbers for the country as a whole for

calendar year 2020 overall state and local tax revenues were up 1%.

That's because income tax revenues are up 2.9%.

Sales tax revenues dipped 2.2%.

Property tax revenues are up 3.9%.

So despite the sharp contraction in the second quarter,

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