In the Fiscal Health Beauty Pageant, Everyone Loses
9th June 2016
Many states are broke, even though their constituents don’t know it. The two main drivers of states’ fiscal problems are the bloated promises made by lawmakers to their public employees about health care and pension benefits and an unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of a problem. Whether the dodging of long-term obligations is done knowingly or inadvertently hardly matters. The results are still the same. Faulty accounting always comes back to hurt the people in the cities and states that have used it—for example, Puerto Rico, Detroit, and Chicago.
Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying that the function of government is to hire and pay government workers. Now those buzzards are coming home to roost.