This is the Cater 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 Colis 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, you know, 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 back and looked at the Great Recession a decade ago.

And the loss of revenues a decade ago was 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 time, that property tax revenues are actually rising. So cities are doing very well. Property

tax revenues are three quarters of local government

revenues that 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 were up 2.9%. Sales tax revenues dips 2.2%.

Property tax revenues are up 3.9%.

So despite the sharp contraction in the second quarter,

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