It is official. Detroit is bankrupt. Detroit is not only bankrupt they can now trash pensions owed to city workers. That is police, fire, hospital and a host of workers counting on those pensions for retirement. The U.S court ruling allows for a bankruptcy type for cities and towns, Chapter 9, to proceed and specifically puts pensions on the fair game bankruptcy chopping block.
Detroit lost a quarter-million residents between 2000 and 2010. A population that in the 1950s reached 1.8 million is struggling to stay above 700,000. Much of the middle-class and scores of businesses also have fled Detroit, taking their tax dollars with them.
Readers of this site are surely aware state budgets are in huge trouble. This evening, the news went prime time in a 60 minutes segment, A Day of Reckoning: State Budgets Crisis. Currently States, all 50 of them, have a $500 billion deficit hole combined.
New York Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch made a statement last week that should have gotten headlines, but didn't.
“I believe that the states across the United States will face deficits a year after stimulus ends of $300 billion to $500 billion a year,” Ravitch told about 200 people gathered at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. “You’re going to begin to see cracks in the municipal bond market well before then, because that’s an inexorable casualty of unfundable state deficits.”
To put this into perspective, the total state budgets for 2010 was about $1.4 Trillion. If his predictions are anywhere close to being true then the budget problems of the states are essentially unfixable.
Welcome to the weekly roundup of great articles, facts and figures. These are the weekly finds that made our eyes pop.
Recent comments