Montana Decides: The Long Green Mile

I’m going to combine two stories, one fictional and one real. In the 1999 fictional film, The Green Mile, the “green mile” referred to the stretch of green linoleum that death row inmates walked to Louisiana’s electric chair. When I was a kid, my father used to refer to cash as “long green.” What do you get when you combine the two stories? Like the prison inmates, perhaps what you get is the worthy dollars’ inevitable demise as a productive public resource at the end of that analogous linoleum path, or “the long green mile.”

According to a recent report titled “The 2023 Real Local Budgets” by...