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Clive Crook in this morning's Financial Times forgets how we got to this point in state and federal budgets.

The federal stimulus was mostly absorbed in offsetting the automatic tightening of fiscal policy by individual states, whose borrowing is strictly constrained. … Now the federal stimulus is running down and many states are embarking on severe and immediate spending cuts and tax increases.

Instead of recognizing this as a problem with the stimulus, Crook sees this as a reason to pump more federal dollars into the economy. I can't come up with a suitable analogy because borrowing more money to cover bad debts has become standard procedure the last few years, but this is still a stupid idea. Crook goes on

Congress is squabbling over the current-year federal budget.

If the previous Congress working with the president had found a way to pass a budget for the current fiscal year on its own, there would be no reason to squabble. Instead we're halfway through the year, President Obama is kicking off his re-election campaign, Paul Ryan is introducing a budget for next year, and Congress is still living legislative hand-to-mouth preparing a seventh continuing resolution.