Anonymous ID: dd9022 June 29, 2020, 12:21 p.m. No.9789471   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>9537 >>9667

>>9789405

Blue States Have Bigger Pension Debts Than Red States

Posted: Dec 16, 2016 7:21 AM [pre-inauguration]

 

The strong (if uneven) economic performance of coastal blue states like California and New York has led a number of leading liberal thinkers, including former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, to conclude that Democratic economic ideas work better in practice than those of the GOP.

 

As weโ€™ve explained before, this argument is misleading for a variety of reasons. But there is one factor that partisans of the blue state model are loath to address: The issue of Americaโ€™s worsening public sector pension debt and the coming state and local fiscal crisis. We have long noted anecdotally that the pension funding problem seems to be worse in blue states (and especially blue cities) than in red ones, but a new analysis helps illustrate just how wide the gulf actually is.

 

Last month, Pension Tracker, a project of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, published its annual list of pension debt per household by state. While most state accounting boards inflate their expected returns and discount rates on existing assets, the Stanford economists use what they say are more realistic (and pessimistic) actuarial assumptions. The results are sobering: All 50 states face large per household unfunded pension liabilities in the tens of thousands or more.

 

Itโ€™s clear from looking at the rankings that the states with most acute pension problems tend to lean Democraticโ€”with the exception of Alaska (at number one) all of the top 10 states went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, including the blue behemoths California and Illinois. But we decided to analyze the association more rigorously, using the partisan voting index from the Cook Political Report from 1994 to 2014.

 

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/12/16/blue-states-have-bigger-pension-debts-than-red-states/