Bankrupt Cities and States Get the National Disaster They’ve Been Hoping For
The comments below are an edited and abridged synopsis of an article by John Rubino
The people running states like New Jersey and cities like Chicago know they’re broke. Ridiculously generous public employee pensions are bleeding them dry, with no political solution in sight.
They also know there are only two possible outs: bankruptcy, or some form of federal bailout. Since the former means a disgraceful end to political careers while the latter requires some kind of massive crisis to push Washington into a place where a multi-trillion dollar state/city bailout is the least-bad option, it’s safe to assume that mayors and governors—along with public sector union leaders—have been hoping for such a crisis to save their bacon.
And this year they got their wish. The US is on lockdown, unemployment is skyrocketing, and mayors and governors now have a plausible way to rebrand their criminal mismanagement as a natural disaster deserving of outside help.
With no stomach for presiding over the end of the world during an election year, Washington will agree to governors’ demands. And so the grossest mismanagement in the history of US state and city government will be swept onto taxpayer balance sheets along with that of all the other sectors that are—surprise!—too big to fail.
One thing worth looking forward to prior to the pandemic was the collapse of unconscionable public sector pensions, and the disgrace of the people who conned teachers, firefighters and cops into thinking that those generous benefits were guaranteed. On the list of financial/political crimes of the modern era, theirs ranks near the top. And now they’ll go both unpublicized and unpunished.
Meanwhile, the resulting multi-trillion-dollar addition to the national debt will hasten the fiery end of the fiat currency/fractional reserve banking/unlimited-government-debt world. One can only hope that future historians will get the story right while the perps are still alive to answer for their sins.