Now Available
Our annual report on state fiscal health. Debt among the states improved slightly. Going from $1.2 trillion down to $938.6 billion.
What happened?
How did your state do? Read the full report below.
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/financial-state-of-the-states-2023
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Lying and piety go together in Washington like ham and eggs. After 9/11, a profusion of government falsehoods on Iraq and other topics ravaged official credibility. The political class responded with an endless profusion of promises to “speak truth to power.” Unfortunately, there are far more Washingtonians praising honesty than there are honest politicians.
Before the ink was dry on the Republican tax bill signed into law late last month, experts predicted that state governments would try to shield their residents from tax hikes they’ll suffer from a sharp reduction in state and local deductions.
If the U.S. defaults on any of its debts, it could see “government spending cut by about 4% of annualized GDP,” said S&P economist Beth Ann Bovino.
Washington lawmakers will grapple with a crunch of fiscal deadlines when they return from their August break next week — with Hurricane Harvey relief also increasingly likely to be on the short-term agenda.
Flush with carefully stewarded tax dollars from almost two decades of uninterrupted growth, the District today is unrecognizable as the bureaucracy that was hurtling toward financial ruin when it was rescued by Congress in the 1990s.
Enacted state budgets for fiscal 2016 represent a sixth consecutive year of spending and revenue growth, according to this report.
A pair of recent reports from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) on Rhode Island’s reforms to its retirement plans for public employees reminded me of a satirical news article on lobbying efforts by religious fundamentalists to overturn the second law of thermodynamics. The title of one of the reports, “Rhode Island’s New Hybrid Pension Plan Will Cost the State More While Reducing Retiree Benefits,” seemed to suggest that the report’s author had managed to repeal the laws of arithmetic. What sort of deliberate change to a retirement system could lead to more money going in and less money going out?