financial reality

Separating fact from fiction in finance and economics


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  • InLibrisLibertas
    Location : Mill Valley, California, United States

    I'm an independent investor. I make my living from the returns on my investments. I work at home, in the northern part of the San Francisco Bay area. I spent most of my career as an executive in high-tech, although I also spent time in banking. Down to one kid in university now!

Last Of The Big Spenders

June 2nd, 2008 by reality

From the NYT:

State and city governments have yet to shrink the economy; indeed, they have even managed to prop it up. They have quietly maintained their spending at pre-crisis levels even as they warn of numerous cutbacks forced on them by declining tax revenues. The cutbacks, however, are written into budgets for a fiscal year that begins on July 1, a month away. In the meantime the states and cities, often drawing on rainy-day savings, have carried their share of the load for the national economy.

That share is gigantic. At $1.8 trillion annually in a $14 trillion economy, the states and municipalities spend almost twice as much as the federal government, including the cost of the Iraq war. When librarians, lifeguards, teachers, transit workers, road repair crews and health care workers disappear, or airport and school construction is halted, the economy trembles. None of that, or very little, has happened so far, not even in California, despite a significant decline in tax revenue.

And of course California, with its incredibly lavish compensation of city (see Vallejo (PDF) for an example) and state employees is a big swinger here.

Posted in Government, Income & Consumption, The Economy |

One Response

  1. PrintFaster Says:

    The next big unwind in credit will occur when state and municipal governments cannot pay back all the credit that they took out on the backs of the taxpayers.

    Raising taxes on houses will create more foreclosures. Falling tax revenues mean bond defaults if taxes cannot be raised, and more debt cannot be larded on. The federal government cannot pay back its debts through any form of projected future tax collections and at some point its debt will be repudiated.

    Unless wages increase overall, debt destruction will roll through the economy like a soil compactor.

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