“The big difference here,” said Robert L. Emerson, the state budget director, “is that we have very little to fall back on. Michigan has already done a lot of the things that other states are only thinking about doing now. Every reserve fund in the state government has been drained long ago. Our rainy-day fund? There’s $2 million in there. That won’t last you 30 seconds.”

Just to cope with the most recent slipping revenue projections, Michigan is preparing to close eight prisons or prison camps (and despite the political risks, release some inmates as soon as they are eligible for release), as well as drop state support for dental and podiatric care, glasses and hearing aids for poor adults. State grants for doctors who agree to live in rural, underserved places and counseling for teenage parents will likely end, too.

On the revenue side, all sorts of notions have been entertained  Michigan, the new Hollywood? Michigan, the wind turbine state?  even an idea offered in a closed meeting this year by John Engler, the former governor, that Michigan ponder housing detainees from the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, raising perhaps $1 billion. (Mr. Engler, through a spokesman, declined to discuss the matter.)

Most people tie the state’s lasting fiscal woes to the collapsing auto industry, and by some measures, Michigan seems to be marching backward. While much of the country emerged from a downturn that started in 2001, Michigan never really seemed to do the same.

The state has cut 10,000 employees since 2000, leaving it with a staff comparable to the early 1970s. Annual general fund revenues, when adjusted for inflation, have shrunk in all but one of the last nine years. They are expected to be $6.9 billion next year, a level last seen in 1991 (and with the inflation adjustment, more like the 1960s).