This week the immense scale and uneven distribution of economic and health damage from the COVID-19 pandemic continued to come into focus, hand in hand with greater clarity around pandemic-related revenue losses threatening state and local revenues and the priorities—such as health care, education, and public safety—they fund. Officials in many states, including Ohio and Tennessee, nonetheless rushed to declare their unwillingness to be part of any solution that includes raising the tax contributions of their highest-income residents. On the brighter side, some leaders are willing to do just that, for example through progressive tax increases proposed in New York and corporate tax subsidy reductions discussed in California.

State policymakers are navigating incredibly uncertain waters these days as they attempt to get a firmer grasp on the scale of their revenue crises, identify painful budget cuts they may have to make in response, and look for ways to raise tax revenues coming from the households and corporations still bringing in large incomes and profits amid the pandemic—all while hoping that additional federal aid and greater flexibility in how they can use federal CARES Act funds will help relieve some of these difficult decisions.

State lawmakers are starting to use fiscal policy levers to address the COVID-19 pandemic, but the actions vary greatly and are just a start. Mississippi, for example, is one state still clarifying who has authority to determine how federal aid dollars are spent. Colorado, Georgia, Missouri, and Ohio are among the many states identifying painful funding cuts they will likely make to shared priorities like health care. The Louisiana House and the Minnesota Senate each advanced tax cuts and credits that could dig their budget holes even deeper. Connecticut leaders are looking at one of the more comprehensive packages, which includes funding cuts as well as revenue measures to reduce the severity of those cuts by cancelling the scheduled expiration of prior-year business tax increases.

April has brought relentless showers of troublesome tax and budget news as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on communities and the public services and institutions that both support and depend on them. There is hope, however, that these troubles have opened the eyes of policymakers and that May will bring more clarity and strong action in the form of federal fiscal relief as well as home-grown state and local responses.

In different ways, Earth Day and the COVID-19 pandemic convey a similar lesson: people around the world face shared struggles and disparate impacts, which they must work together to overcome through both emergency action and systemic change. In keeping with that lesson, state fiscal policy news this week was strikingly similar around the country, as states take account of the major threat posed by the pandemic to their budgets and attempt to grapple with its disproportionate impacts on communities of color and low-income families.