TheBlackberryAlarmclock.com

Thingish Things

We Owe, We Owe, So Off to Work We Go…

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jan• 18•11

Republican New York State comptroller candidate Harry Wilson, on whose campaign I worked, talked tirelessly about the chronic underfunding of state pension funds in New York and across America during his campaign.  His warnings – and the warnings of others – are beginning to get picked up across the country as the full extent of the shortfall is slowly being realized.

The former chairman of New Jersey’s state pension fund pegs the cumulative debt among states at $2.5 trillion in today’s Financial Times. Other estimates have debt exceeding $3 trillion and growing.

This is not the regular state debt we hear about all the time – the debt that’s dragging down New York, New Jersey, California, Illinois, Michigan, et al.  This comes on top of that.  This is an extra and massive shortfall that we have a Constitutional obligation to pay going forward.

It is hard to comprehend numbers this large.  But it easy to explain what effect they will have on us.

If not forcefully addressed through public service union givebacks, this shortfall will necessarily mean:

Higher taxes at the state and local level;

Less money for schools;

Cuts in Medicaid spending, and

Massive reductions in discretionary spending, e.g., infrastructure repairs, mass transit, parks, senior services, youth programs, you name it.

Not-for-profits reliant on government support should be at Def Con One.

And yet the public service unions want more.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Comments

  1. […] comptroller candidate Harry Wilson, a super-smart guy who led the restructuring of General Motors, warned of this extensively in his campaign last […]

  2. […] bottom line, as these pages have written before, is that states and municipalities have promised — in ink — more to public employee […]

  3. […] Furchtgott-Roth on the growing state pension crisis across America. This was an issue prominently raised in 2010 by a friend and former client Harry Wilson when he was running for New York State […]

Leave a Reply to TheBlackberryAlarmclock.com Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.