Plan now for worse budget woes ahead

The Concord Monitor weighs in on NH's growing budget problems:

Though lawmakers and Gov. John Lynch passed an ostensibly balanced budget for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, New Hampshire is not out of the fiscal woods yet.

As Monitor State House reporter Lauren Dorgan noted in a column on Sunday, that budget will be short some $110 million if a court finds that the state can't take money from a medical malpractice fund set up decades ago to ensure that health-care providers could buy coverage at affordable rates. But even if New Hampshire does make it out of the forest of fiscal despair, it will only be to limp into a landscape of political fissures, parched revenue streams and mountains of obligations.