That’s not explicitly true. Through funny business accounting the state can, and likely has already, cooked the books so that it looks like we have a balanced budget. I think it just takes them creative thinking on how they value things and how we estimate how large revenues will be in later years.

Eventually, it all falls apart because at some point people, contractors, government employees and so on all need to receive cash in their bank accounts. Until the state can’t make those payments and we have checks bouncing, the average Joe like me has no way to know for sure how balanced the budget is or isn’t. Are we 1 year away or 10 years away from state checks bouncing?