Ravitch Seeks Better State Budgeting as Price of U.S. Aid

Richard Ravitch, who helped steer New York City out of a fiscal crisis in the 1970s, said the federal government should track states’ debt and fiscal health while insisting they improve budgeting and meet obligations such as pensions as the price of getting U.S. aid.

The former New York lieutenant governor, in an interview during a Philadelphia meeting of the State Budget Crisis Task Force he created with former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, said, “the federal government ought to put discipline on the states.”