[cinquemb]

Unfortunately Mass. has unfunded pension liabilities exceeding $20 billion (not including municipalities), and unfunded health care liabilities exceeding $45 billion (including municipalities. At the same time, states will have to deal with the new normal, which is lower economic growth indefinitely and lower returns on invested assets.

Is there any place where one can read about this/ any place where one can see data? Now that we are in the new normal and have seen cities like Detroit go bankrupt, maybe states are facing the chopping block as well (depending if they can still afford to make payments on their liabilities). It will be interesting to compare other places based on their financials as well.

[kmfrk]

Chicago is also boned in the future: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/chicago-sees-pension....

EDIT: Alternatively http://www.suntimes.com/news/cityhall/21642911-418/city-defi....

Keep in mind that Detroit had loaned money from other states that aren't likely to get it back.

[cinquemb]

Do states and cities release data like this for the public to see (kind of like open gov api's in csv/json/xml)? I wonder how many more cities/states are taking loan money from other cities/states and are facing the gaping holes in their budgets? It would be pretty cool to throw something together and put it up on github.

[smsm42]

These data are probably available buries somewhere in periodic financial reports that many cities publish, but as far as I know, there's no common format, many of these reports are not well readable by tools (best case - nicely formatted PDF with numbers buried somewhere within, worst case - PDF scan of some typed pages with numbers buried within) and as far as I know no site that actually aggregates these data into one database. Given the variety of funds, arrangements, regulations and other things, it would not be very easy to create such a database, probably would require a very large investment. And since it the initiative for local authorities to participate in it is next to zero (worst case, it will expose them for criticism, best case they're OK but not getting any benefit) it would probably very hard to pull off. I'd be glad to be mistaken on this.

[cinquemb]

I think you are spot on. I've been searching, and mostly coming up with PDF's (that do give the overall numbers) with very little break down for cities.

It's a pity that with all the hand waving over Open Gov initiatives that things like this are still buried, while I can easily find out all the different colors of street lamps implemented for the past 10 years for xyz neighborhoods…

[smsm42]

Feds probably could use the power of federal grants (or withdrawal of such) to make much more order in this area, but I guess politicos are busy with more interesting things than getting some data in order.

[cinquemb]

Well it could help with getting a sense of spending budgets and allocating resources to states/cities more appropriately, but I guess we have the Federal Reserve for that.

Well I had an idea to convert the PDF's to text, so now i'm working on structuring it and filtering so maybe i can extract some values using some kind of financial dictionary/ statistics techniques.

[kmfrk]

If they do, the Sunlight Foundation would be the people to ask: http://sunlightfoundation.com.

[cinquemb]

Just checked, and they don't seem to have anything dealing with this.

Though a quick search has led me to find TIF Projection Reports for Chicago[0] from searching "debt obligation" in metro Chicago data [1], but I can't seem to find any past dealings (not sure how to look for it). I want to try to put the revenue generated from taxes (across different sectors if possible), servicing of obligations, population changes, and projected obligations in perspective, and compare to other cities/municipalities/states.

[0] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Community-Economic-Developmen...

[1] https://www.metrochicagodata.org/browse?limitTo=datasets&q=d...

[anigbrowl]

Yes, but because everyone wants their local government to be independent from big bad state and federal governments there's almost no consistency in the format or publication requirements.

[cinquemb]

Right, so everyone in this case are local bureaucrats who are partially employed by big bad state and federal governments through handouts from taxation and monetary inflation, who don't want to show if the emperor of their local debt obligations aren't wearing any clothes (possibly because of what recognition of misallocation of resources/labor entails), because the public is not demanding it from them today?

There's gotta be money in opening this can of worms up, right?

[anigbrowl]

No, everyone includes all the people who live in a district that complain about too much government and object to things like national curricula or accounting standards or whatever. That can include bureaucrats but isn't necessarily limited to them.

This sort of thing is one of my interests and I even sort of enjoy digging through budget documents to root out these nuggets of information. Financial analysts and people like that do it too, but most of the general public is just not all that interested in such details. I used to think that if you simply put the information in front of people, a lightbulb would pop on over their head and they'd start demanding fiscal accountability. Turns out, much like environmental, development, and other long-term issues, that a lot of people feel overwhelmed and just tune out completely.

If it was just a matter of making the information available, then The Economist would be the most widely read newspaper.

[cinquemb]

Fair enough.

My interests in trying to work with data like this came from my difficulty in finding data I could mine "easily" on municipal/city bonds as apposed to equity funds portfolio companies.

Part of me thinks that if some people were given a set of tools or a place they could go where they could make an more informed decision (with clicks of buttons and simple displays) about their 401k's, Roth IRAs, 403 B's or whatever investments they make if they don't trust typical fund managers, that they would be able to see there are tradeoffs to be made for their own fiscal stability. There seems to be a lot of interest with this surrounding micro finance /loans, but that is just one part of the equation.

[dmarusic16]

The Economist had a great article on this the other week: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21582282-pension...