At one point, the state’s treasurer reported that Arkansas’s general revenue fund showed a balance of $4.62, Dr. Johnson said, and by 1933, Arkansas could not make its bond payments. Analysts tick off many reasons that such a crisis would not happen now, or at least not in exactly the same way  with a default on bonds. For one thing, states’ payments on bonds generally amount now to only 4 percent or 5 percent of their total budgets, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Still, states have other obligations that some view as vulnerable, including to pension systems.

In most states, some bonds are considered the first priority for payment, or a very high priority, even before ordinary services. Certainly, any serious talk of allowing states to seek bankruptcy protection under Chapter 9  which municipalities can currently pursue  could create doubts in an anxious municipal bond market.

Perhaps the largest protection against a repeat of Arkansas 1933 is the simplest: states have straightforward  if not always politically palatable  ways to pay their obligations if problems arise. They can raise taxes or cut spending. Arkansas had those options too, but its costs had grown monstrous (for a while, the state had among the highest per capita debt in the nation), and the prospect of new taxes seemed impossible at a moment when per capita income was among the lowest in the country and the state’s revenues were rapidly shriveling. “The problem is,” said James E. Spiotto, a municipal bankruptcy expert at Chapman & Cutler, a law firm in Chicago, “if you don’t address the problems, then the problems sometimes get larger.”

For the record, Arkansas 2011 is not facing the level of economic misery of some other places. State officials are predicting a slight rise in revenue. Some leaders are talking of cutting the sales tax rate on groceries. And the state owes 2.6 percent of its spending  among the lowest in the country  to debt interest.

After 1933, Arkansas officials eventually restructured their debt, under pressure from unhappy bondholders who had filed suit. But the fallout would leave its mark for years.

Whatever political wind had rolled in with so much excitement (and borrowing) in the 1920s turned the other way. New leaders promised to retrench. They adopted rules that required more approval for any borrowing. One state leader even briefly entertained a plan to end the state’s support of education after eighth grade as one more way to save, Dr. Johnson said.