The Spending Problem

Writing in Defining Ideas, economist Allan H. Meltzer on the train wreck of federal, state, and local government spending. An excerpt:

Almost all state and local governments are required to balance their budgets annually. Instead of paying higher wages to teachers, police, firemen, and other employees, governments promised future pensions and health care that, being in the future, didn’t affect the current budget but would come due only after the officials who made the promises were out of office. These obligations are now coming due. Few were fully funded in the interim. And states avoided the balanced budget requirement by employing schemes such as chartering government corporations that they excluded from the budget, exempting capital projects, and many others.