The Hill News

The Supercommittee has come and gone without reaching an agreement on reducing our nation’s debt. Most of the post-mortems focused on who was to blame for the breakdown. If we had been able to slash the projected deficit by trillions of dollars, according to conventional analysis, Washington might have been able to get our debt under control and the United States would be on the path back to a firm fiscal footing.

But the dirty little secret is that it may not have been sufficient to avoid a coming fiscal catastrophe. The thing that pushes the United States over the tipping point just might be the exploding state pension crisis.

This crisis that has been a long time coming and we are just beginning to grasp the magnitude of the state pension debt tsunami that’s going to hit us within the next decade. Because virtually all states have some type of balanced budget requirement, it has been relatively easy to ignore the fact that unfunded pension o! bligations have been purposefully left off state balance sheets. In truth, those obligations in most states far exceed the total of outstanding state debt, spending, and tax revenues combined.

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