Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels says certain American states are drowning in debt and it will cost taxpayers.
Connecticut, California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York are on the list and pension payments to retired government workers is a contributor to this debt.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/these-american-states-are-drowning-in-irretrievable-debt
But but, we have a huge predicted 6 billion dollar budget surplus how can we be in debt?
ReplyDeleteHow Jerry? Why don't you just kick down a Billion and poof problem solved ?
Rusty, deficit and debt are two different things, and the pension issue predates Jerry Brown by decades. Credit Jerry Brown for reversing the deficit his Republican predecessor left.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I don't mind paying off obligations to seniors who worked hard for the state for decades out of the general fund. These were your first responders, police, teachers, road workers, etc. Personally, I think we could save a lot of money by doing more work in house rather than contracting out, and we tried to pass a proposition some years back which would have mandated that we use public resources if it is cheaper than contracting out, but thank the conservative Hoover Institute, Cato Institute and others for screaming "socialism" against any effort to slow down the process of privatization, which is basically gifts to big campaign donors. It was voted down, and now we have debt.
All those bond issues throughout the 80s and 90s to build more, and more, and more prisons so that we are now one of the most incarcerated societies in the world (first in percentage of population once the Soviet Union and Apartheid fell). And we spend more and more and more on roads for more and more and more clogged traffic of single-occupant vehicles rather than public transit.
So despite some of the largest economic expansions on the planet in an economy which if we were a nation would be the fourth largest in the world, we remain in debt. And no, it isn't our "welfare entitlements." We are far from the highest per capita paying in that department.