Posted on 04/06/2024 5:57:11 AM PDT by george76
The 75 largest cities in America were collectively $288 billion in debt at the end of fiscal year 2022...
53 major cities that do not have enough money to pay their bills.
Yet all of them claimed their budgets were balanced, as is required by law. That means lawmakers understated each city’s debt by not including future costs like employee pensions and healthcare
...
New York City has a taxpayer burden of $61,800, the largest by far despite being the most populous. The city has only six cents saved up for every dollar it will need to spend on retiree healthcare.
Chicago was the second-worst and would need $42,900 from each taxpayer to pay off its debt. That’s partly because the city’s pension liability increased by $1.7 billion in 2022.
Honolulu, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon round out the five most burdened cities.
Washington, D.C. was the healthiest of 22 cities with a taxpayer surplus. There would still be $10,700 left over for each taxpayer if the city paid all its debt.
Irvine, California and Plano, Texas are the only other two cities on the list with a taxpayer surplus above $5,000.
Background: The 75 cities owned a total of $307.4 billion of assets to pay $595.3 billion in liabilities.
The debt includes $175.9 billion for upcoming employee pensions and $135.2 billion for other retiree benefits.
Still, the numbers pale in comparison to the $34.6 trillion federal debt, and that held by states.
California, New York and Texas, for example, each have more state debt than the 75 cities combined.
Summary: With the constant magnifying glass on federal spending, it can be easy to forget that local governments are still racking up debt at the same time.
Thanks for posting. Socialism Is Legal Plunder - Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) - The Law
Unless, of course, said retiree is murdered by an illegal. Then all they have to pay out is the $250 SS death benefit.
Clickbait like this is worthless unless combined with an analysis of state-by-state debt as well.
Biden will go down in history as the best purveyor of the Cloward/Piven strategy in history. He will be exalted and revered by current and future Marxist/Communists in perpetuity.
Obviously, the debt-to-income ratios are not going to get better anytime soon. These cities, already squalid, have the additional problem of capital flight and with each desertion, the problem continues to compound.
Cities originally evolved as machines to make money, by concentrating both capital and labor in close proximity. When working together, and using the principle of fair distribution of profits between the keepers of the capital and the labor that carried out the necessary tasks to assure that flow of goods and services that contribute to the profitability of the enterprises involved.
Capital had a duty, to include those who provide the day-to-day smooth operation of the business model by giving them a fair incentive to give their best and most productive attention to the job at hand, rewarding merit at every turn. Labor also has a duty, to provide the best efforts to the job at hand and that is not merely in terms of hours worked per week, or years on the job, but in really taking an interest in the business model that fits the mission statement of the organization created by capital.
With this bilateral co-operation, both capital and labor grow and expand. The seeds to failure of this co-operation lie in the dreams of avarice of those who have neither the capital nor the incentive to hire out in a productive manner, and a command and control scheme evolves, in which the outsider takes control of the dialogue between capital and labor, and sets them up as adversaries. To provide for the common good, of course, but more than that, to syphon off from the profits and incentives, through taxation and regulation, harness both capital and labor as their “mediator”. The mediator role takes on a life of its own and the original concept of the benevolent but patriarchal custodian of capital and the obedient but incentivized hirelings is lost. Jockeying for positions of “virtue”, the factions of capital and labor are forced to play out their roles as opponents, and not co-operative entities.
The mediators, of course, dole out favors to the custodians of the capital, by engaging them in public works, and seek favor from the providers by giving them benefits of one form or another, without regard to merit or profitability. And they take their cut, of course.
Some city government structures are more constrained than others, of course, but they all suffer from the same command-and-control schemes to a lesser or greater degree. The most successful cities have kept the meddling in the private capital sector to the very minimum, and to that degree, everybody prospers. But other city administrators have not shown the same constraint and they have becom dismal, squalid failures.
How many of those urban hell holes are run by democrats? Probably ALL of them. I say let them starve. /spit
A very rational, well-stated explanation. Thanks very much, alloysteel. BUMP!
Maybe they can solve this by putting up illegals in luxury hotels and giving each of them cash cards worth up to $10,000 each.
This is what happens when you drive off your tax base.
Can I have my Nobel Prize in Ecomonics now.
It becomes a big problem when City policies create living conditions that are so bad that anyone with the resources to do so, leaves the city.
Detroit was the canary in the coal mine. Detroit if memory serves is at 40% of its peak population. Detroit has been deconstructing itself in an effort to restore livability to the city.
We are experiencing the death of the Republic.
How damaging is all of this for Municipal Bond Sales???
Thanks
It drives up their interest rates (because they become more risky); view them as junk bonds. The only way to pay these government debts is to devalue the dollar (print massive amounts) - and we’re living through that right now. It was what wrecked Germany in the 1920s with their war reparations, and is having the same effect now.
COVID hastened a situation that was looming for most cities: non-manufacturing jobs, due to technology, no longer needed to be situated near ports (whether on the Atlantic/Pacific coasts or the Great Lakes). On top of that, they have a massive ageing infrastructure (including their expensive government employee caste), accompanied by huge spending on people no longer sending tax revenues into the city coffers (as the flight of jobs accompanied the flight of property taxpayers and city payroll taxpayers).
The push for “national socialism” (sound familiar?) is driven by the realization that as long as companies and workers can flee to greener pastures in “free states”, then the solid socialist areas are doomed - the geese that laid the golden eggs have fled, leaving just the outstretched palms of the permanent underclass and the government worker caste “administering” them.
If you would like more information about what’s happening in Oregon, please FReepmail me. Please send me your name by FReepmail if you want to be on this list.
Oh, Pish-Posh! Best. Economy. Ever. EVER! Per Brandon.
*SMIRK*
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