But not nearly as much attention has been paid to one of the most dire needs, that faced by states and cities. They are confronting disaster, they haven’t gotten enough help yet, and so far congressional Republicans don’t seem particularly interested in doing anything about it.

How bad is the state crisis? State officials and budget experts now estimate that they need the federal government to give them at least $500 billion to deal with the shortfalls they’re facing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the recession.

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“States face a fiscal crisis that’s much worse than even what they faced in the Great Recession,” Michael Leachman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told reporters on Tuesday, noting that this is in part because unemployment is likely to be considerably higher than it was even in 2009.

Here’s why states are so vulnerable right now. They’re facing massively increased costs, both to deal with the public health crisis and to give support to all the people who have suddenly lost their incomes. At the same time, their tax revenues have plunged because economic activity has ground to a halt. In addition to the decline in income tax revenue, states rely heavily on sales taxes to fund their budgets — but if no one’s buying anything, there’s no sales tax revenue coming in.

Then comes the kicker: Almost every state is required by their constitution to balance their budget every year. So their spending is going up and their revenue is going down, and in order to meet that balanced budget requirement, they have no choice but to slash spending on other key functions such as schools and parks and law enforcement and road maintenance and job training and everything else states do.

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States are already preparing for the reality of imposing yet more pain on their populations in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Depression. For example, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) recently announced that the state will likely have to cut its budget by 20 percent.

Indeed, according to a survey from the National League of Cities, “more than 2,100 U.S. cities are anticipating major budget shortfalls this year and many are planning to slash programs and cut staff in response.”

Though states got $150 billion in the Cares Act, the $2.2 trillion rescue package Congress recently passed, that money was specifically aimed at helping them deal with the pandemic. They aren’t supposed to use the aid they got to make up budget shortfalls.

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Meanwhile, CBPP projects that even after that money is spent and the states exhaust the approximately $75 billion they have in rainy day funds, they’ll still need $360 billion to make up the shortfalls in their budgets. That doesn’t include the additional money they’ll have to spend on the pandemic.

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Five hundred billion dollars is also the figure that a coalition of nonprofit groups is urging Congress to appropriate, and it’s the figure that the National Governors Association (a group representing all governors, both Democrat and Republican) is requesting from the federal government.

In theory, this shouldn’t be a partisan issue. That help will go to red and blue states alike, and is being requested by governors from both parties. Yet there’s little to indicate that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and congressional Republicans are particularly interested in providing it.

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Right now Congress is caught in a stalemate because Republicans want to provide extra money for small businesses and nothing else, while Democrats are asking for another phase of economic rescue that addresses a variety of needs, including aid to states. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) have indicated they’re pushing for $150 billion in aid to state and local governments (though that could change).

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So we once again find ourselves in a situation in which Democrats are begging Republicans to help save the nation’s economy, and Republicans seem to want to do as little as possible.

Hovering in the background is our infantile and vindictive president, whose every whim Republicans rush to satisfy. He’s in an extended feud with state governors, the target of his ire shifting from place to place depending on who he thought failed to compliment him sufficiently on any given day.

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What happens if McConnell agrees to provide more aid to states, but Trump decides that the governors have been mean to him and he won’t sign any rescue bill that helps them?

The victims, of course, would be all of us. But in the Trump era, that’s becoming a familiar story.