In his Economic Populist column this week, manufacturing advocate Johnny Venom reports on the looming budget crises faced by some large U.S. states, including Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and California:

Illinois has joined California and Arizona by having budget deficits of larger than 40% of their overall budget. This is coming after a disastrous year in 2009. The 2nd tier states, states in which the budget deficit is between 30% and 40% of total budgets, are not in much better shape. These state include: Alaska, Nevada, New Jersey and New York...New York's deficit of $7.4 Billion is the 4th largest nationwide.

Obviously the current "great recession" is taking a toll on each state's bottom line.  But there's an interesting common denominator involved, too: many of these states have lost hundreds of thousands of good-paying manufacturing jobs in recent years. In fact, between 2000-2007, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California alone lost more than 1 million combined manufacturing jobs.  And the drop-off from each state steepened with the onset of the recession. Manufacturing jobs pay well and help to support other jobs in the surrounding community.  They also contribute significantly to city and state tax rolls.  It shouldn't be much of a surprise, then, that as good jobs have disappeared, states are seeing greater shortfalls in their budgets. There is no easy fix to get the U.S. economy moving again, but it seems ever more self-evident that a key step is to reverse the hemorrhaging of U.S. manufacturing and to begin growing the industrial jobs of the 21st Century.  Doing so will take dedication and serious effort, including a serious revamp of U.S. trade policy, but the alternative, as Johnny Venom notes, is the looming state budget crisis, which "will probably be the biggest political hot-potato of the 2010 campaign season."