… except who was responsible.

From the Republic:


Debt has been a quick but uneasy solution to budget pressures.

As state tax collections lagged and demand for state services grew, lawmakers and Gov. Jan Brewer scrambled for ways to balance the budget. They drained the state’s “rainy-day fund,” cut spending and delayed big-dollar payments to schools. It wasn’t enough.

They anguished for more than a year before sending Brewer’s temporary 1-cent-per-dollar sales-tax increase to the ballot, where voters last month passed it.

Meanwhile, lawmakers borrowed to patch over the holes in the budget….

Arizona’s legislature is of course dominated by the GOP and has been; aside from one elliptical reference to the legislature’s being “conservative,” the story doesn’t dwell on that fact at all.