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.
These situations with failing (Socialist Democrat) cities remind me of a computer game my boys and I used to play called ‘Sim City.’
We would design a city and get it up and running and functional (this took weeks, sometimes!) and it was very educational for the kids. You had to plan for roads and schools, collect taxes, build subdivisions, have adequate food and clean water; all that running a city entailed.
Then when we had things humming, we would set every man-made and natural disaster to happen overnight, and in the morning come back to a smoking pile of ash, LOL! Sometimes Godzilla would even show up.
And I’m CONVINCED that this is the reason one of my boys is now a City Planner. ;)
“ 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.”
Their finances are so good that they found $550,000,000 to refurbish the Capital One Center so they could keep the Caps and Whizzers from moving to Virginia.
Quite right, this process has been happening since the early 1970s or earlier (if you want to count the capture of the industrial base by unions).
The decline of the industrial centers has been happening for a long time. Creeping socialism is a long process. Technology and the buildout of the Interstate system has facilitated the decentralization of industry.
Detroit was the center of the Car Industry and the Car industry was the first to take the hit of the opening of the US markets to international competition thanks to James Earl Carter, the Destroyer.
And why shouldn’t so many U.S. cities be so far in debt, the U.S. Presdients and Congress have done far worse, and the citiies have just followed after them.
Herein northeastern NJ the problem was that the loss of industry removed the principal taxpayers for all of the “services” - and homeowners quickly found themselves on the hook for everything.
My town had manufacturing decades ago, so we had paid firefighters (most of NJ - and the country - doesn’t); they were paid for by industry because industry was the primary reason they were necessary. The industries died or left, but this legacy continues - we pay over a hundred firemen primarily to sleep all day (there aren’t enough fires to even justify the cost). The union opposes regionalization (there are several small, densely populated municipalities that could certainly share services like this), but it doesn’t happen enough - so the taxes are far higher than in other areas (for dwindling returns).
It has only chased out more employers, which chases out employees - so we end up just being a dumping ground for an increasingly-illegal immigrant population. We’ve replaced the previous economy with a hybrid of government employee caste/poverty industries (and there is little private-sector middle class, and no upper class, in more and more areas).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.