US Published National Debt
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The Truth
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Each Taxpayer's Share: $909,000
Financial State of the Cities 2021
Our fifth annual Financial State of the Cities report. This analysis surveys the fiscal health of the 75 most populated US cities prior to the coronavirus pandemic.
Bill's Blog
Bill Bergman serves as TIA's Director of Research. He is responsible for managing TIA's federal project and State Data Lab's data base. Bergman spent 13 years as an economist and policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
Financial State of the States 2020
Our eleventh annual Financial State of the States report. This analysis surveys the fiscal health of the 50 states prior to the coronavirus pandemic.
Financial State of the Union 2020
Click here to view our report on the nation's fiscal health before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
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.
Why we need to stop calling auto-centric roads ‘assets’
February 25, 2021
StreetsBlog USA
By Joe Minicozzi, includes “… The primary failure of GASB (in my book) is the total failure to account for infrastructure as a liability. To GASB, roads are assets. Which makes some sense, if you are an entity with roots — as in the case with GASB — in the culture of bond brokers. ”
Sleuthing GASB
February 24, 2021
Utah League of Cities and Towns
Virtual workshop tomorrow Feb. 25 at 11am MT, text intro includes “In this month's Lab, we will discuss GASB or The Governmental Accounting Standards Board and its influence on municipal budgets and finances, the cornerstone of a fiscally-healthy city. We'll look at what we can do to change the standards that shape our biases.”
Philadelphia earns an ‘F’ for failing budget
February 23, 2021
University City Review (Pennsylvania)
By Christen Smith (The Center Square), includes “… Truth in Accounting likened city officials’ habit of underfunding pensions to ‘charging earned benefits to a credit card without having the money to pay off the debt.’ Instead, the funds are directed toward ‘politically popular programs,’ leaving future taxpayers to cover the losses. The tactic only makes budgets appear balanced, the report concludes.”
Let Illinois state government fail
March 1, 2021
Taxpayer Education Foundation
Includes “… ‘On behalf of the hundreds of thousands of taxpayers we represent, we demand that the U.S. Senate do its job and decline to bailout irresponsible state and local governments and to decline to enable these tax revenue junkies to inject any additional funds right into their arms. Sadly, they must be allowed to fail in order for their behavior to change,’ concluded Tobin.”
Biden’s stimulus and the ‘financialization’ of taxes
March 1, 2021
The Wall Street Journal
Op-ed by Joseph Sternberg, includes “Theorists and practitioners increasingly blur the lines between monetary and fiscal policy on the spending side of the government’s ledger. The next shoe to drop will be the entanglement between the Fed and Treasury on the revenue side.”
We need to bust the myth that a deficit is a bad thing
February 17, 2021
The National (Scotland)
Letters to the editor, including one by Malcolm Parkin that includes “… Common sense says we can never now repay or even reduce the national debt, and history proves we don’t have to, as it has risen from £350 billion in 1997 to £2000bn in 2020.”
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