Introduction
The bruising battle over the debt ceiling that unnerved markets this summer and contributed to Standard and Poor’s downgrade of its AAA rating on US debt served as a reminder of President Barack Obama’s statement at the beginning of the 2011 budget battle: ‘In the long term, we cannot have sustainable and durable economic growth without getting our fiscal house in order,’1 noting particularly the need for ‘a number of hard choices and painful tradeoffs not seen in Washington for many years’.2 The growing impact of cutbacks in state and local governmental funding has only increased the dilemma.