With that bold declaration, Gov. Jan Brewer proclaimed before a joint session of the Legislature this week that Arizona now boasts a budget surplus, the first in four years.

Heading into continued budget negotiations with Congress, as well as November’s presidential election, the Obama administration insisted this week in Las Vegas that the federal government should not retreat from hefty investments in education, infrastructure and research and development.

Tom Loveless is a former sixth grade teacher and Harvard public policy professor. He’s been studying the achievement gap, education policy, and school reform. So how can we reform our school district? What would teachers and the state have to do? How do we close the achievement gap? And can we compete on a global scale with other countries, whose students surpass us? Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution weighs in.

Which presidential candidate will win Nevada in 2012? Will Nevada decide to soften its heart and better fund education? Will our freeways be less congested?

I have a warring nature: I’m an optimist who expects the worst to eventually happen. So here’s what I’m hopeful about this year, though I’m sure it will be terrible.

The state has a comprehensive study by the Brookings Institute to guide the preparation of an economic development plan, a full-time executive director and an Economic Development Board that officially has met a half-dozen times.

Nevadans can be forgiven a degree of skepticism about the notion of economic renewal, not to mention about “Unify / Regionalize / Diversify”—the new state economic development agenda my team at the Brookings Institution, Brookings Mountain West, and SRI International presented to Gov. Sandoval last month.

Until recently — the past three years — Nevadans have had a pretty easy time of it compared with our 49 sister states.

For decades, Nevada’s economy had a reputation for being bulletproof. It quickly rebounded from any economic downturn and continued to grow. A decade ago, Nevada was dealing with the slump after the 9/11 terrorist attacks but would quickly rebound and take off on a torrid pace of growth.

Confession: I find it hard to be optimistic about the state’s future.

If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard somebody suggest Nevada needs to diversify its economy, I’d have enough cash to build a major-league stadium, a high-tech video poker server farm, a solar energy plant big enough to power the entire West Coast and a high-speed train to Anaheim.

There’s a lot to chew on in a 178-page report presented to the Economic Development Board on Monday, but that one stood out to me for its short- and long-term benefits.