(The Center Square) – A public policy think tank this week released a tool that provides debt and spending insights for state and local governments and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture of Illinois.
The tool provides debt and spending insights for the 100 largest municipalities, counties and school districts in the country and all 50 states for fiscal years 2020, 2021, and 2022.
The Reason Foundation showed that Illinois had $247 billion in debt as of fiscal 2022. Illinois was second in the country in total liabilities in 2022, trailing only California. The states with the least total liabilities are South Dakota, Idaho, Nebraska, Montana and New Hampshire.
“What’s really troubling with Illinois is that there is more than three times as much debt as there is assets at the state level,” said research director Geoffrey Lawrence.
When looking at state public pension debt, Illinois has nearly double the pension liabilities of any other state. At the end of fiscal 2022, Illinois had $139.8 billion in public pension liabilities, New Jersey had $75.1 billion. Illinois is one of ten states that account for nearly 85% of the total employee-related debt among all 50 states.
At the end of 2022, Illinois had $10,915 in pension liabilities per capita, followed by Connecticut at $10k per capita.
From fiscal 2020 through 2022, 47 states saw increases in revenues. Alaska, Michigan and Wyoming were the only three states that did not increase revenues. During the same time period, total assets, such as growth in cash, investments, receivables, land, buildings and infrastructure, increased for all 50 states.
On the local level, Reason Foundation found that New York City had over $300 billion in total liabilities at the end of 2022, more than four times Chicago’s $74 billion in liabilities and nearly six times Los Angeles’ $51.3 billion.
