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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 8/11/22

How to Put Any City or State into Surplus, Forever

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Scott Baker
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The following short but major economic change will work on any city - defined here as having a population above ~100,000 people - or state. I'll use New York City and New York state as examples.

Several publications are sounding the alarm over the fiscal year's dismal city and state pension fund performance. Here is one emphasizing New York's bond debt:

Click Here

NY State rates an Aa2 but just a D rating for its " Budget Maneuvers" - i.e. borrowing habits; the second lowest score and shared by only a handful of other states.

NY City has a $252b pension fund (or "had" that anyway until recently):

Click Here

Without going too deep into the budget weeds, because it's unnecessary, it's easy to show that the entire system of pensions, borrowing from the same institutions managing those pension monies, and having to put up with borrowing at all...are all symptoms of deeply flawed and corrupted thinking.

The annual NYC budget is now ~$100b. There's 2.5X that amount in the pension fund. There was $76b more at the close of last fiscal year: $326b total, according to the latest 2021 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) ending June 30, 2021, available online (Crains has sources I don't for the new figures).

Think about that for a moment. The loss in value in the pension fund is 3/4 the size of the entire New York City budget!

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Scott Baker Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter Page       Linked In Page       Instagram Page

Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.

His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:
http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/

Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of (more...)
 

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