The Mercatus Center at George Mason University issued their 2018 rankings of states by fiscal condition. You can find the North Dakota discussion here. As a point of reference North Dakota was ranked in the top 5 each of the previous three years. The current ranking puts the state squarely in the average category.
Continue reading State Fiscal Rankings-ND #19
I caught numerous headlines last week about the President unhappy with the Fed raising rates (here is one from CNN). I am not going to get into whether the President can or cannot criticize the Fed, and I am actually not going to get into whether he should. The question we need to ask is whether or not he is correct about economic policy.
The Washington Post had an excellent piece on states and how they handled their tobacco settlement dollars (available here). It is a longer article but well worth the read given that it is one of the first analyses of what states are doing with the money from this settlement. The answer for many: squandering it. I am not going to rehash all the details of the article but there are bigger issues to tackle.