In the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson writes about five states that:

went into the final day of the fiscal year facing the prospect of shutdowns of public agencies or paying bills through IOUs unless they devised ways to close the yawning gap between their obligations and their recession-savaged revenue.
The list of states — Democratic and Republican, old economy and new — is sufficiently diverse to dispel any notion that the fiscal crisis of the states is disproportionately the problem of one party or one region. It is, rather, hard-wired into the American system of governance, wherein virtually all the states have required themselves to produce balanced budgets even during depressions — which means they must slash services and lay off workers even though such actions actually deepen the downturn.

Recessions aren’t new, and neither are state balanced-budget requirements. To understand the cause of today’s budget brinkmanship, we would probably be better off looking at such things as the percentage of state budgets spent on Medicaid — something that has changed, largely in response to federal policy.