The poor condition of state and local financial statistics made a targeted ARPA bailout impossible. The Census Bureau publishes an Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances, but the report appears on a two- to three-year lag. Private entities such as the Bloomberg corporation and the Urban Institute collect more current data but only make it available to paying subscribers. When ARPA was being debated in Congress, free, up-to-date data simply weren’t available to lawmakers, and the absence of such data hampered their ability to make informed decisions about the law.
If we are to avoid this problem in the future — if we are to produce comprehensive free data on state and local finances in anything approaching real time — the entire system of collecting these statistics must be overhauled. State and (at least the biggest local) governments should publish their revenues, expenditures, assets, and liabilities in a consistent format that can be easily compared and aggregated.