ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
SHARE
Local governments aren't recession-proof, they are recession-lagged.
The NBER official dates for the last recession are March-November 2001. The management consulting firm that I worked for at the time serves state and local governments. We continued expanding staff and opened a new office. It was not until late 2002 that spending cutbacks in our clients finally caught up with us... and the partners took me up on my suggestion of closing down the Miami office that I managed to save money.
A bit later I worked with them to analyze IT spending for LA County. The numbers are instructive. Total IT staffing at the County:
FY02 - 3,120
FY03 - 3,255
FY04 - 2,868
Total IT spending for the County:
FY02 - $687M
FY03 - $703M
FY04 - $564M
The fiscal years end in June. The budget process sets the spending levels for the upcoming budget year in the March-June timeframe. So we see that a recession which ended in November 2001 did not affect County IT spending decisions until March 2003.
Overall LA County spending showed a very similar pattern.