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Girard Miller

Girard Miller

Finance Columnist

Girard Miller is the finance columnist for Governing. He is a retired investment and public finance professional and the author of “Enlightened Public Finance” (2019). Miller brings 30 years of experience in public finance and investments as a former Governmental Accounting Standards Board member and ICMA Retirement Corp. president.

Miller writes Governing's bi-weekly newsletter on public finance, which you can sign up for here.

He can be reached at millergirard@yahoo.com. 

The program, a cluster of tax loopholes, is making fat cats fatter without doing much about racial inequities and urban joblessness. There are ways to reform it to benefit those it was touted to help.
Rural America won't like it, but there are good arguments for Congress to provide direct aid to public transit systems and to municipalities that rely heavily on the hospitality taxes vacationers pay.
With an expanded role, they could serve as an efficient conduit between local governments of all sizes and federal financial resources for revenue shortfalls and infrastructure.
Locally focused investors support the innovative entrepreneurial ecosystems that will produce high-paying jobs in the post-pandemic world. Public officials can learn a lot from their angel investors.
If businesses looking to reopen are going to be shielded from coronavirus-related lawsuits by their workers and customers, there should be stringent, OSHA-style regulatory enforcement.
If state and local governments and their employees become pawns in a Beltway ideological battle, the voting could turn on issues of federalism. And health care could be the issue that creates a tidal wave.
Everybody wants to rebuild it. Nobody wants to pay for it. But there are plenty of options for planning and financing infrastructure projects that don't require deficit financing.
In suggesting that it should be allowed, the Senate majority leader is conflating COVID-19 budgetary emergencies with historical public-pension deficits. They have nothing to do with each other.
The governors are calling for a quick $500 billion to offset plummeting tax revenues. But we don't know how long a pandemic recession will last or how deep it will be. We should be guided by hard data.
Spending vast amounts on a crash program now won't help those who've lost their livelihoods to the coronavirus pandemic. We need to take the time for sensible planning to do it right.