HARTFORD, Conn. — A program that helps thousands of Connecticut welfare recipients find work has been in limbo for two months. Family resource centers, which provide child care, adult education, and other services, have shut their doors.

In Pennsylvania, day care centers have laid off workers. Some preschool programs are scrapping plans to reopen in September. And tens of thousands of state employees had to wait to be paid for several weeks.

While most states have already passed their budgets, Connecticut and Pennsylvania remain the only two in the nation still at odds over how to balance the books this fiscal year amid plummeting state revenues. Connecticut's revenue flow has dropped by $2 billion from last year while Pennsylvania's came in $3.3 billion less than expected.

"It's a symptom of a very severe recession that's caused some really difficult political choices to be made," said Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers in Washington, D.C. "You happen to have two states that haven't happened to get it together."

While the fallout of not having a budget is similar, the political dynamics at play in the two states represent opposite sides of the same coin.

In Connecticut, a Republican governor, M. Jodi Rell, has insisted more spending cuts are needed and a Democratic-controlled General Assembly wants higher income taxes on the wealthy to help cover the deficit.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell insists he and his Democratic allies have already put bone-deep cuts on the table and want to bridge the remaining deficit with additional taxes. Republicans — who control the Senate with a commanding majority — insist more spending reductions are needed.

Other states with daunting deficit problems also went into fiscal year-overtime before finally passing their budgets. California had to issue nearly 210,000 IOUs worth about $1 billion to pay vendors and contractors until a budget was signed. Ohio was forced to resort to weeklong spending plans after leaders failed to reach a compromise before the fiscal year ended June 30.

A budget deal doesn't appear imminent in Pennsylvania.

Rendel blames Pennsylvania's failure to get a comprehensive budget deal in place on the resistance to his cuts-and-taxes approach.

Erik Arneson, a spokesman for the Senate Republicans in Pennsylvania, frames the debate as a choice between cutting spending to match revenues, which his party favors, and increasing spending and then raising taxes to pay for it, which is how he characterizes Rendell's approach.