One second into the new fiscal year, at 12:00:01 a.m. on July 1, 2009, the State of Utah had already spent over $361 in taxpayer money. By the end of the hour, over $1 million dollars had been spent, and by the end of the day, the state had spent $31,272,844.67 of tax revenue.
To put this spending into perspective, at the current spending rate the state could buy all 2,736,424 Utah residents a Nintendo Wii ($249.99) by July 22, 2009. Alternatively, the state could buy every Utahn an Apple iPhone ($599.99) in 53 days. And by mid-December – just in time for Christmas – the state could buy every person in Utah a 73-inch Mitsubishi flat-screen, high-definition television ($1,899.99).
The Utah Spending Clock, which appears on Sutherland Institute’s homepage, www.sutherlandinstitute.org, has been re-set and will be ticking at $361 per second throughout the 2009-2010 fiscal year. The good news is, the current spending rate is actually $2 less per second than the last fiscal year.
The total spending appropriated by the Utah legislature for the 2009-2010 fiscal year is $11,414,588,306.
