Fiscal Crisis in States Will Last Beyond Slump, Report Warns has lots of gloom to report about the likely length of the states' current financial mess:
"The fiscal crisis for states will persist long after the economy rebounds as states confront financial problems that include rising health care costs, underfunded pensions, ignored infrastructure needs, eroding revenues and expected federal budget cuts, according to a report issued here Tuesday by a task force of respected budget experts.
The severity of the long-term problems facing states is often masked by lax state budget laws and opaque accounting practices, according to the report, an independent analysis of six states released by a group calling itself the State Budget Crisis Task Force. The report said that the financial collapse of 2008, which caused the most serious fiscal crisis for states since the Great Depression, exposed a number of deep-set financial challenges that will grow worse if no action is taken by national policy makers. . . .
The report added a strong dose of fiscal pessimism just as many states have seen their immediate budget pressures ease for the first time in years. It also called into question how states will be able to restore the services and jobs that they cut during the downturn, saying that the loss of jobs in prisons, hospitals, courts and agencies had been more severe than in any of the past nine recessions. “This is a fundamental shift in the way governments have responded to recessions and appears to signal a willingness to ‘unbuild’ state government in a way that has not been done before,” the report said, noting that court systems had cut their hours in more than a dozen states, delaying actions including divorce settlements and criminal trials.
The report arrived at a delicate political moment. States are deciding whether or not to expand their Medicaid programs to cover the uninsured poor as part of the new health care law — an added expense some are balking at even though the federal government has pledged to pay the full cost for the first few years and 90 percent after that. Many public-sector unions feel besieged, as states and cities from Wisconsin to San Jose, Calif., have moved to save money on pensions. And Washington’s focus on deficit reduction — and a series of big budget cuts scheduled to take place after the fall election — has made cuts to state aid inevitable, many governors believe.
If federal grants to the states were cut by just 10 percent, the report calculated, the loss to state and local government budgets would be more than $60 billion a year — which it said would be nearly twice the size of the combined tax increases that states enacted from 2008 to 2011 in response to their deepest fiscal crisis in more than 50 years.
Things are worse than they appear, the report contends.
Even before the recession, Medicaid spending was growing faster than state revenues, and the downturn has led to even higher caseloads — making the program the biggest single share of state spending, as many states have cut aid to schools and universities. States do not have enough money set aside to cover the health and retirement benefits they owe their workers. Important revenue sources are being eroded: states are losing billions of sales tax dollars to Internet sales and to an economy in which much consumer spending has shifted from buying goods to buying lightly taxed services. Gas tax revenues have not kept up with urgent infrastructure needs. And distressed cities and counties pose challenges to states.
While almost all states are required by law to balance their budgets each year, the report said that many have relied on gimmicks and nonrecurring revenues in recent years to mask the continuing imbalance between the revenues they take in and the expenses they face in the short term and long term — and that lax accounting systems allow them to do so. The report focused on California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Virginia, and found that all have relied on some gimmicks in recent years to balance their budgets. . . .
When desperate budget officials go looking for money to balance their budgets, they often see public pension funds as an almost irresistible pool of money. One common way of “borrowing” pension money is to not make each year’s required government contribution. Most places use actuaries to calculate how much money they must set aside each year to cover future payments — a number known as the “annual required contribution.” But despite the name, there is usually no enforceable law that the state or locality must pay it.
As a result, the task force found that from 2007 to 2011, state and local governments had shortchanged their pension plans by more than $50 billion — an amount that has nothing to do with the market losses of 2008, which caused even more harm.
When money is withheld from a pension fund, the arrears can start to snowball, because most states count on the money compounding at a rate of about 8 percent. Eventually the unfunded liability grows unmanageable, given all the other fiscal pressures on states and cities. In addition to pensions, America’s states and municipalities are estimated to have promised well more than $1 trillion in health benefits — that most have not started saving for — to their retirees. (The health costs became apparent only a few years ago, when an accounting rule was changed.)"
Summary
The report is a clear warning that some very strong and serious remedial action has to be taken at the state and local level, as well as at the federal level, to deal with the financial fiasco underway throughout American government.
The numbers are even more staggering when the inevitable cutbacks in the federal grants to states are considered. Add in the pension and health care retirement funding shortfalls and the fiscal situation at the state and local level is dire.
And all that is prior to factoring in the new ObamaCare requirements for Medicaid expansion and other costly additions.
Sometime soon the crisis will be front and center for all Americans.
How it then gets resolved will be the painful part for us Americans in our roles as local, state and federal taxpayers, citizens and consumers, one and all.
But resolve it we will, because resolve it we must. Of that I'm extremely confident.
Thanks. Bob.
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