The increased fiscal gap also makes future government policy far less predictable.

But there are also many tax reforms that could help close the fiscal gap without substantially burdening the economy.

And to close the fiscal gap, spending on these programs would have to be cut by around 40 percent.

It's hard to imagine a situation under which the entitlement programs would be rolled back sufficiently to close the fiscal gap.

Yet closing the fiscal gap by raising taxes would mean rolling back all of the Bush tax cuts, and then some.

One is the decades-old question of how to resolve the fiscal gap between the state's richest and poorest school districts.

So far, the talks on how to cope with the looming fiscal gap are in their infancy, legislative staff members said.

The budget was approved in a special session called to deal with the state's projected $846 million fiscal gap.

This means a desirable revenue-expenditure asymmetry but with a fiscal gap to be closed.

According to my rough calculations, keeping the child credits and the cutout while rolling back the rest would close only about half the fiscal gap.