Are you having a hard time balancing you household budget? Does more cash go out than comes in? Are your school, property, sales or income taxes too high? Many people are facing the dilemma of not only utilities, heating and gasoline rising constantly along with things like medicine and medical treatment, but also government mandated costs. Some will say that the government needs the money to operate and it is only fair that they get it, but what if the state governments are getting too much? Has anyone addressed this issue or do the politicians hope that everyone is looking the other way? If most states are getting more money than they need, this gives the politicians a nice pork barrel to use for pet projects.

I don't want to talk in suppositions here, so lets look and see what is happening with most of the states in 2006. New York State has just projected that their budget surpluses will be over 2 billion dollars. This probably means that it will be a lot over that amount. Is it right that they should be making such a huge profit? I always thought that the idea was to break even or close to it. If a state makes this kind of profit, doesn't it seem that some charges should be reduced? It would be very easy for New York to reduce charges. First of all, the state has an extensive toll system. It would be a simple matter to reduce tolls or even do away with some of them. The state income tax could be reduced as could the sales tax. What ever they reduced would be the right thing to do. It is a funny thing, but when talking about this surplus, no one mentions the fact that taxes on gasoline have created a windfall as gas prices have risen. The last time I checked, the state gasoline tax was 45.77 cents a gallon. Think of this, if you have a 15 gallon tank and fill up, the state is getting $6.86 cents. The state tax runs from 4% to 7.7%.

If one is to look up the the budget in California, you will see it referred to in this way, California has a reserve of about 5.2 billion dollars. Hey doesn't that mean that the state has over 5 billion dollars more than it should have? Wouldn't you think that this was a surplus not a reserve? Oh those guys in office have such a way with words. Most of us know that California has a huge population. It could easily be a country if it were in Europe. It also has a very strong economy. It has been said that if California was a country, it would have the seventh largest economy in the world. It would be very easy to lower sales taxes in California because they are way too high anyway at 7.25% going up in some areas to 8.75%. If you buy gasoline in California you will pay 38.3 cents tax per gallon, meaning that filling our imaginary 15 gallon gas tank will net the state 6.24 dollars every time you fill up. State income tax ranges from 1% to 9.3%.

New Mexico is a state that has a small population compared to many of the states in this country. The NewMexican actually states that the surplus is due to high energy prices. You see, here is the problem, the states really like high energy prices even though they will claim they don't. If they didn't, they could have banded together and tried to lower them or at least lowered or did away with the state tax on energy. New Mexico is projected to have a surplus of over 1 billion dollars for 2006. New Mexico is fairer than most states as it only charges 18 cents per gallon tax of gas. Its sales tax is roughly the same as most starting with a base of 5% that might be increased to 7.1875% after the locals tack on their bit. Their income tax runs from 1.7% to 5.7%. New Mexico has big plans for their surplus. No, it is not to give it back to the people, The state will finance capital projects up to $700,000,000 and keep the rest in reserve. There is that R word again. Oh by the way, New Mexico has decided to use much of its surplus to become partners in a space port. Yes you heard me right, a space port. It seems to me that it is much too early for this type of nonsense. I would think that since we don't have any commercially viable vehicles that can take commuters to other planets and may not have any for another 30 - 50 years, this is a bit premature. Oh well, they have to find some way of spending all that cash.

Little Arizona is awash in cash. It had an increase of 16.5% in revenues since 2005 and they had a surplus that year. This is after property and income tax cuts. They just can't seem to give away enough cash to break even. They do have a problem that may cost them extra cash. The state is waiting to see if the courts order them to teach english to non english speaking students. Isn't the U.S. wonderful, any other country would expect them to learn the language on their own, not make its citizens pay for it.

So how big is this budget surplus for the states across this country? Over 57 billion dollars in extra revenue has flowed into the states. Every state in this country, except for five, which are Wisconsin, Louisiana, Kansas, Michigan and Illinois have reported budget surpluses for 2006.

I don't want anyone to think that only the U.S. states are showing these high surpluses. Russia, of all places, is predicting that in 2007, this once poor country will have a surplus of 56 billion dollars. Can anyone remember when the U.S. government showed a budget surplus? Oil has been a friend to the Russian people. Hong Kong had a budget surplus of almost 2 billion dollars in 2005 . China took in revenues of over 22% more than expected so far this year. Even Britain is benefiting from oil. They had a surplus in the month of July that was tremendous. The surplus was 6.3 billion pounds. In dollars this is 11.87 billion dollars. They still had a deficit for the year but it was cut down to 10 billion pounds, a far cry from what we owe.

By the way, the U.S. debt increased 14% to 2.69 Trillion dollars as of June 2006. With everyone showing huge surpluses, our country, one of the richest in the world is just about bankrupt. What does this say for our leadership?