$5,900,000,000 more = "budget woes"

The Governor has announced a hiring freeze (damn!) because of falling general fund revenues.

This year, Kaine implemented a series of cuts based on forecasts of reduced revenue. As a result of those cuts, the state finished fiscal 2008 on June 30 barely in the black -- $5.4 million in a general-fund budget of $17.2 billion.

But, when you look at the budget for previous years, you see the general fund expenditures have increased by a quarter billion dollars just over the previous year ($16.96B), and are still a little above those from two years ago ($17.03B).

The article also whines about the difficulty of making the state's $77B two year budget, when the previous two years totalled $71.1B. Gosh guys, an extra $5.9B from 7.7M residents (~$375/person/year) isn't enough of an increase? Who's getting the money? The state employees aren't seeing any pay raises.