US Published National Debt
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The Truth
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Each Taxpayer's Share: $919,000
Financial State of the Cities 2022
Truth in Accounting has released its sixth annual Financial State of the Cities report.
Financial State of the Union 2022
Our Financial State of the Union report found that the financial condition of the U.S. government worsened by more than $10 trillion in 2021.
Financial State of the States 2021
Truth in Accounting's twelfth annual Financial State of the States report, a nationwide analysis of the most recent state government financial information.
Data-Z (formerly State Data Lab)
Create your own chart with more than 700 data variables, including demographic, economic and financial at the federal, state, and city level.
Column: Connecticut’s Spending Problem is Your Problem
September 26, 2022
By State Rep. Kimberly Fiorello
One of the best ways to understand the State’s budget is to imagine it’s part of your own personal budget.
According to Truth in Accounting, a non-partisan non-profit research organization whose mission is “to compel governments to produce financial reports that are understandable, reliable, transparent and correct,” each Connecticut taxpayer is on the hook for $62,500 of the state debt — the highest debt burden per taxpayer in the country. An updated report is coming soon in October.
This means you have your checking and savings accounts, your credit card bills, the mortgage on your house, and you cannot ignore that Connecticut has a credit card bill for you too – your share of the debt the state has imposed on you.
AM 560 Local governments in Illinois can raise property taxes to cover losses due to inflation.
September 26, 2022
Senator Mark Warner wants state and local governments to be more transparent with financial data
September 23, 2022
Getting your hands on the financial statements of your local government can be frustrating. And sometimes when you do track it down the document is not formatted in a way you can search the text, Judi Willard at Truth in Accounting says, “It can be really frustrating, sometimes they literally put a picture of a number, it’s a jpeg that looks pretty on the document but where did you come up with that number.” This is why Senator Mark Warner of Virginia introduced the Financial Data Transparency Act. Which would require state and local governments to submit their financial statements in a machine-readable format. Marc Joffe from the Reason Foundation says, “This type of disclosure has been required by the Security and Exchange for corporations for years, and it's time the government follows suit.” LISTEN HERE
Kauai acts to spike pension spiking
September 6, 2022
Grassroots Institute of Hawaii
"Some advice for all our policymakers out there struggling with public pension liabilities:
The first step is admitting you have a problem. The next step is getting real data on how bad that problem is. Only then can you begin working out how to address it."
Exploring the Relationship between the size of Government and Economic Growth
September 19, 2022
2022 Kansas Green Book Report
"U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis saw states as “laboratories of democracy” conducting “experiments” in public policy. Today, more than eight decades after Brandeis coined the phrase, state experimentation with tax policy makes it abundantly clear that tax policy has a direct impact on economic growth. As shown on page 27, each of the eleven states that enacted an income tax since 1960 now has a smaller share of state GDP relative to the other 39 states and each one also has a smaller share of state and local tax revenue. That is a remarkable statistic; those eleven states enacted a new source of tax revenue and lost revenue share to other states! On the contrary, states with low tax burdens and states without an income tax consistently outshine their higher-burden peers on the key, tangible economic measures like growth in private-sector jobs, GDP, and wages. What’s more, citizens are taking notice and “voting with their feet” by flock- ing to low-burden states from higher-burden counterparts. Skeptics try to dismiss this definitive migratory trend by cherry-picking success stories like Texas and Florida and characterizing them as ‘’happy accidents” of favorable geography, climate, and/or resource abundance."
How many recessions you’ve actually lived through and what happened in every one
April 19, 2022
CNBC
"With the U.S. economy on the verge of another significant recession as a result of the global coronavirus pandemic, social media users of all ages are going online to argue about which generation has suffered more at the hand of past economic downturns."
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