It's the taxes, stupid

Almost no one in most of the online or broadcast media seems to be talking about this, so I'll just pose a few questions.

Are our governments about to go broke?

One effect, not too far in the future, of the economic shutdown is the drying up of tax revenues for all levels of government from the federal system on down.  With crazy high unemployment, income taxes are going to fall.  The collapse of the tourism industry means that hotel/motel taxes will not be collected.  Locally those pay for all sorts of things.  Gas taxes aren't being collected in the amounts they normally are since people aren't driving.  With the cutback in spending, sales taxes collections will be lower; that means every damned SPLOST in the nation will bring in less money than thought.

There are other effects.  The economic downturn we forced upon ourselves means that property values may stagnate or drop.  That means that every local or state government that depends on property taxes will see less coming in.  Services paid for by those taxes will be cut.  School systems will be hard hit, at least here in Georgia where they're paid for by property taxes.

What's worse is that for the last few years property values have been increasing, and so property taxes have gone up.  Those yearly increases in revenue were budgeted in, the school system assuming that each year there would be more money to spend.  That's no longer the case.  Expect budget cuts, wage freezes, maybe even layoffs in the school systems of Georgia.

Government services at all levels, city, county, state, national, will be starving.  Either taxes will go up or services cut back, probably both.  Get ready because it's coming, and we've done it to ourselves by overreacting to the virus with draconian economic damage that hasn't stopped people dying.