Sold Out Futures: A State-By-State Comparison of State and Local Government Debts, Past Infrastructure Investment, and Unfunded Pension Liabilities Through FY 2019

In two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, with society under stress, we have seen increasingly strident political fights over whose cultural attitudes and preferences should be imposed on others, who should get to contribute less to the community, and who should get to take out more.  In the shadows, however, is a bipartisan consensus as to who should be made worse off and be sacrificed the rest of their lives to pay for it all.  Ordinary people in later born generations, those who will be living in the United States in the future.   The pandemic has given politicians of all alleged views, and the interest groups that back them, an excuse to do, to an even greater extent, what they have done for 40 years.  Cash in the common future to address the perpetual “emergency” of the present.

So it was in Washington in 2020 when The Donald and the Republicans, having already sent the federal debt soaring to cut taxes for the rich and then ran a federal deficit equal to one-quarter of the U.S. economy.

https://larrylittlefield.wordpress.com/2021/03/15/federal-reserve-z1-data-for-2020-the-king-of-debt-went-out-with-a-bang-and-our-children-and-grandchildren-will-be-poorer-for-the-rest-of-their-lives-to-pay-for-it/

And so it is in Washington today, where Biden in the Democrats claim their plans will be “paid for” – meaning the burden shifted to the future would only be as great as it was under Trump and the Republicans.

It is in this context that for the fifth time, I have reprised an analysis of state and local government finance data from the U.S. Census Bureau, for all states and for New York City and the Rest of New York State separately, with data over 49 years, to determine the extent to which each state’s future had been sold out due to state and local government debts, inadequate past infrastructure investment, and underfunded and retroactively enriched public employee pensions.   You’d think that the extent of disadvantage for the later-born, and who benefitted from creating it, would be the number one issue in every state election, and the number one topic of debate in the media.  Instead, it remains under Omerta, especially here in New York.  Shouted down under the comforting culture war issues that Generation Greed prefers.  So, although standing up for the later born and common future may amount to nothing more than standing on the beach shouting into a hurricane as a social tsunami heads for shore, over the past month I have updated the “Sold Out Future” analysis with data through FY 2019.  This post, a national summary and explanation of where the data comes from and how it was used, and the next three, will show what I found.

“We Will Build the Information Superhighway”

That’s what lobbyists for the telecommunication companies promised in the mid-1990s, in the run up to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. What the industry’s lobbyists were trying to beat back was municipally owned telecommunications utilities, which are far more common in electric, gas, and even cable television than those living in urban New York might expect. State- and local government- owned electric and gas utilities employed 88,343 full time equivalent workers in the U.S. in FY 2014, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Excluding water and sewer utilities, private utilities employed 500,000 people in 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The telecom companies got their way. There would be no equivalent of the federal government’s rural electrification program for high speed internet. So 20 years latter did the industry keep its promises, or was the general public bamboozled by lobbyists and campaign cash?