There are plenty of conversations I can keep up with. Pro basketball conversations. College basketball conversations. Rules of basketball conversations. I’m pretty well-rounded.
None of those conversations have anything to do with the so-called fiscal cliff, a term that’s been tossed around on NPR a lot recently. To me it roughly translates to “Dear God I’ll listen to Train on KXT before I try to figure this story out.”
Anyway, CNBC did a sort-of Idiot’s Guide to Fiscal Cliff-Dwelling yesterday, and it was helpful. I now feel like I can present this post to you without crossing my fingers and hoping no one calls me out.
As you can see by the above photo, Dallas County wouldn’t do too poorly, comparatively. It’s in the second-lowest grouping of federal funds per capita, owing mostly to the fact that there aren’t too many federal jobs in the county. Tarrant County would fair slightly worse.
When you open it up to Texas as a whole, though, it’s a disaster.
Owing mostly to military bases, NASA, and other federal entities, Texas has one of the highest percentages of federal employees, even more so than Virginia and Maryland:
State by state, there are blue states like California and red states like Texas with high federal employment as a percent of the total. But that’s how the sequester was designed: to spread out the pain sufficiently among states and counties and the political parties to provide enough incentive to bring all parties to the table to make a deal.
But in some cases, that could require a senator to vote for cuts that would hurt his or her largest employer, the federal government.
If you, too, can only keep up with basketball conversations, here’s some more information about the fiscal cliff.
