When Orange County lost a little over $1 billion in derivatives investments, they were crying "poverty" and threatening to shut down schools, police would have to be laid off etc. However someone dug into the Orange County CAFR and found out that the county had about $16 billion in profitable investments! The county, from their profitable liquid investment funds / cash position could have continued performing the same services, without collecting one dime in taxes, and could have done so for another 11.9 years from the existing funds prior to running out of money! The crying stopped.
While he was a Mayor, Jesse Ventura's city council wanted to raise $360,000 in taxes to cover a short fall on their "city budget for schools." Ventura objected when he discovered the city owned $48,000,000 in idle investments funds from which the $360,000 could be drawn from without raising taxes!
1997 state of Texas composite governments owned investments of 8.3 Trillion.... $275,000 in surpluses for every man, woman and child in the state.
In 1989 New Jersey there was a (needed?) 2.8 billion tax increase. But NON DISCLOSED to the public was how much cash the state brought in that same year: $86,775,380,712. Nearly 87 BILLION earnings in their CAFR.
Arizona in 1997, reported an Annual Service Budget of $5.5 billion while the state's CAFR (printed by the Auditor General's Office) showed total gross cash receipts of $17 billion. That's a difference of over $11 billion.