It’s small comfort, perhaps, but state funds are declining faster elsewhere.

Employment and commerce are the twin engines of state revenue. With joblessness rising and sales falling, states, including Mississippi, can’t provide the money they’ve pledged to their operational entities.

According to the Rockefeller Institute, which tracks state fiscal matters, states in the Far West are down 18.1 percent in expected receipts. They’re the worst off. Plains states are down 5 percent. They’re doing the best.

Mississippi and its neighbors in the Southeast are down 11.7 percent, just about in the middle. It’s not good, but it compares favorably with an overall 14 percent drop in collection of taxes by states in the first three months of 2009 compared to the first three months of 2008.

Unlike members of Congress, who in the past few months have approved $700 billion for bailouts, $787 billion for stimulus and are in the process of approving a federal budget that will eclipse any and all previous budgets, members of the Mississippi Legislature and money managers in most other states can’t pass a simple resolution to authorize borrowing trillions.

So what will happen, at least in Mississippi when lawmakers do reassemble in Jackson and put together Mississippi’s spending plan for the 12 months starting July 1, some of that borrowed federal money will be used, along with the state’s cash reserves, to plug holes to pay day-to-day expenses.

Gov. Haley Barbour, in a letter to legislators earlier this month, carefully explained an approach to deploy, strategically, discretionary portions of the $2.8 billion flowing to Mississippi to manage what is projected to be a total shortfall of $1.4 billion over three years. It could and should work.

This may well be necessary, but think about the larger question. Will today’s economic straits accelerate state dependence on federal money to supplement routine state operational expenses over the longterm? If so, the role of states could be disappearing before our eyes.

Recessions have consequences. After this one is over, Mississippi could, in essence, be one of 50 regional branches of a central government, funded and managed from Washington, D.C.