what i'm going to talk about is something called fmap.but fmap is it is common stands for federal medical assistance percentages, that it is a share of medicaid funding that the federal government covers for state. so this ranges from 50% in some of the wealthier states like massachusetts, for example, to a much higher percentage in states that are like, for example, mississippi at 75%. and during the last recession and during the recession in 2001, the federal government boosted the fmap, being a paid a higher share of state medicaid costs. this was a really effective form of countercyclical stimulus during those recessions because it's a form of state fiscal relief. you might know that states have balance operating budget requirements, so during recessions when the revenues are falling, there's a lot of pressure on states to either cut services or raise revenues to make sure they meet those requirements. and what is boosting the fmap does for boosting the share of medicaid spending the federal government covers is that it lets states us

the federal government should enhance fmap. it also helps with the timing if you make it into an automatic stabilizer. you can make it more sure that it will not end too soon or begin too late. the devil is in the details and how you make sure that enhanced fmap is going to trigger automatically and then trigger off when the economy is on its way to recovery is difficult. but we do in the paper is offer two potential sets of triggers, which are economic indicators that can say, at this point the economy is doing poorly so we are going to turn this on and then, at this point, the need for the fiscal relief is no longer necessary. the thing i want to of the size is these triggers are arbitrary to a larger extent. two weot what iedded to the chose. the main thing for us is enhanced fmap should be something that triggers on and off automatically, rather than relying on congress for discretionary stimulus in the future. and the other thing i will note about the options we propose in the paper, we do look at how they would have for d