Martha Njolomole is an economist with the American Experiment North Dakota and the author of a new report on North Dakota's budget trends called "From Boom to Balance: Smart Spending for an Uncertain Future."

Her argument is that North Dakota is spending too much money. "We've seen in the last couple years that North Dakota is spending more money than it is collecting particularly in the general fund budget which is really what most people refer to as as the budget," she said on this episode of Plain Talk.

She said this "structured deficit" has been obscured by balances from the state's various funds, but contends "that at a certain point you're going to run out of those balances and you won't be able to maintain your current spending trends."

"It's pretty much like a family that earns $3,000 a month but they're living at $4,000 a month," she contends.

North Dakotans have been feeling the impact of this, she says, "I think probably because of the oil and gas industry a lot of taxpayers...don't feel the pain and the cost of big government in North Dakota."

Njolomole and her group aren't alone in flagging this spending trend. In April, when Gov. Kelly Armstrong released his budget guidelines for the coming biennium, he called the state's spending growth "unsustainable." Particularly in that a lot of the state's spending is based on reserve funds and not ongoing revenues.

In fact, in every budget cycle since the 2017-2019 biennium, most of the state's spending has come from these so-called "special funds" as opposed to general fund revenues from things like the sales and income taxes.

Despite this, the American Experiment North Dakota report also calls for eliminating North Dakota's income tax, something we challenged Njolomole on. How can you advocate reducing revenues at a time when spending is exceeding revenues? This report also criticizes North Dakota for being too dependent on revenues from oil and gas activity, but wouldn't eliminating the income tax make the state more dependent on those revenues?

We asked Njolomole about it.

Also on this episode, co-host Chad Oban and I discuss the Protect College Sports Act, and whether or not the status quo in college sports deserves to be protected.

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