The press corps plays Chicken Little about a drop in state tax revenue.

Whenever the economy starts to slide southward, the press starts sprouting horror stories spout about how "tax revenue shortfalls" are starving state governments. Today's (March 31) Washington Post Page One piece—"States Are Hit Hard by Economic Downturn: Many Cutbacks Felt by Most Needy"—repeats so many of the genre's clichés that the writers could have assembled the piece from memory.

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