Unlike the federal government, state governments cannot take on debt to cover budget deficits. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on both the supply side of state budgets (taxation) and the demand side (government spending) is therefore a pressing policy concern across the nation. In their recent working paper, Christos A. Makridis and Robert M. McNab predict the effects of the pandemic on state budgets using estimates of how changes in employment affect tax revenue. They predict that the average state will experience a 6.7% decline in its tax revenues under an optimistic scenario, culminating in $79.9 billion lost in total aggregate revenue for the United States, or a 11.1% decline under a pessimistic scenario, culminating in $125.2 billion lost in total.