Jeffrey Miron: States Are Underestimating Budget Crisis By Trillions

"...far worse than official estimates"?

No, "...far worse than officials lied about"".

This is the dutch boy with his fingers in the dike, but where HE wanted help, our government spends it's time trying to pretend things are fine.

Remember, folks; The Recession ended 2 years ago, right?

RIGHT?

Investors buy muni bonds because the debt is guaranteed by “too big to fail” insurance companies.
When “too big to fail” insurance companies fail, the Federal Government picks up the debt. Muni bonds are on the same track as the sub prime loan debt fraud.
Forget logic and common sense. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the SEC has very little control over the $2.9 trillon muni bond industry. States can do whatever they want to and the bottom line is the Federal Government guarantees their debt.

illinois. poster child for enormous pensions and terrific health care. All not funded. Just, I guess, a ponzi scheme.

Happy Monday to all my friends right here on the Ticker. America is looking at a down market today, but it's been below 14k for sometime now. The states have a better chance of ringing the dinner bell at the Halls of Reason due to balance budget amendments. The federal government is bankrupt and has no dinner bell, it has only empty dinner plates and "Fly Boy Economics" to raise the stakes even higher. Look, there he is again telling the Tea Party Congress to pass another bailout... Grandstanding failures are telling Congress to act now! Yeah, okay there... Next!

And this is why Stimulus II as prosposed is another stealth bailout of state governments. The stimuli are band aids for the economy - NOT growth hormones and they know it.

should of been a water worker in ohio: Akron: 80 K ayear (with overtime )
retired at 52: 56,000 ayear.

Average citizen or household in akron 35,000 per year. No pension. work till 67 . ss 1400 per month.

Get ready California for the real thing. Keep feeding the public Unions and the illegals.. It is coming the Big One..

Many states are projecting the prosperity of the recent past into the far future. We are heading back to ordinary times when tax revenue will be much less.

......unless of course you be honest......and figure in the extreme deflationary depression which is just around the corner.......then time runs out very very quickly. It has never happened before so we don't have name for it.....extreme hyperinflation in food and energy concurrent with extreme deflation in all manufactured non food items. Very Very bad scenario. Wages and tax revenue disappear at the very same time the cost of living skyrockets. No wonder everyone is paying their credit cards and dumping their mortgages.

Government pensions are a problem at federal state and local. They all take care of their cronies, while the taxpayer gets hosed, especially your kids. Remember the Newport Beach lifeguard story? $120K pay & full pension in 20 years. "But these are no ordinary lifeguards" said the city. Everybody's a Hasslehoff.

A Senator or Representative should NEVER get a pay increase. When they are elected, whatever the salary is, that is what they should get as long as they keep getting re-elected (even after sitting out for a term). While the starting salary can go up over time, incumbents should NEVER get an increase. These were not supposed to be lifetime jobs. People were supposed to go to Washington for a couple of terms and then return to the REAL world to work for a living. We do not need TERM limits, just limits on the amount of money they can sponge off the taxpayers. No raises, no pensions.

Well if the population is 310 million and he's talking Tillions, 12 $%%i ZEROs
That's like 6 Zeros per person, a lot to collect from the unemployed!

There are triple-folds of trillions of financial deficits,including Federal(sovereign) budget deficits,the now revealed states budget deficits,and the last but not least the banks,corporations,hidden capital reserves deficits which need to recapitalize the capital loss during the 2008 financial collapse.

I have an idea; stop giving retirement benefits to state employees that are 35% better than those that people in the private sector receive. If they don't like it, they can quit and come work in the real world, though I doubt many teachers could hack 50 hour weeks year round.....

What strikes me about states' "pension debt" is the question of why should government employees be unionized anyway? Workers are organized to stop the governments from hiring child labor or to make them pay standard holidays and vacation pay or heat their workspaces or make sure they get paychecks every week? No. Unions are basically engaged in the practice of blackmailing employers. Unions shouldn't be tolerated within government for teachers, police, firefighters or anyone else. Next thing you know, they'll be unionizing the military! Government employees should be compensated just like everyone else, they're not special, they don't do extra work or more important work.

If Obama's millionaire tax passes effectively making a portion of municipal bond interest taxable to millionaires and billionaires, it will be the last nail in the coffin of state debt refinancing.

Herein lies the problem you cannot keep spending more then you take in. This should be apart of employment with the public sector just like the private sector. Times get hard you take a pay cut or cut back people. The math is simple. The problem is people do not get it.
Pensions should not be available until your 59 or 60. The more you tax the less you will get as more and more people will barter instead of declaring the money. This is the main problem in Europe. They barter to get around the repressive taxes there.

the states and local governments brought this mess on themselves they were fat and happy when the markets were high... showing surpluses in the budget funds which gave them a green light to either reduce or not make annual payments, instead they shifted that cash over to pay for other "stuff" this has compounded the problem as the market has stepped back meaning the funds are woefully underfunded....

sir...we arent presently taking enough money from you to pay the people who we promised wed take care of for votes. so.....looks like were gonna need to be taking more...or risk getting voted out of office for looking incompetent.....

does anyone believe that giving politicians more money wont result in more entitlement spending???

You need to eliminate or alter all public sector pensions.
They are not structured to be sustainable. They need to be structured more like Lottery payouts. When one retires and qualifies for a pension, then the pension needs to be a structured payout. Something like $50,000 a year for the next 30 years. Not $50,000 the first year and we'll increase every year until you die. In the first case, I pay for the pension the year someone retires. In the second case, I run a Ponzi scheme.