Leave it to El Numero Uno Conservative On Fire--aka, Jim--to remind us of yet another enormous mountain of doom that nobody wants to deal with.
When I entered the words “municipal bankruptcies” in my search engine, I found that in February and March of this year that there were a few articles on this important subject. But, they didn’t seem to garner much attention. One such article written in March at the American Dream blog. The article, which I highly recommend, lays out ten signs that America is on the verge of a municipal debt crisis. This is sign No. 10:
#10 In all, there have been 21 municipal defaults so far in 2012. The grand total of those defaults comes to 978 million dollars.
The article also has an excellent video on the effects of even minor increases in interest rates on our national debt.
So, if municipal debt bubbles are so serious, why aren’t we hearing about it from the major media outlets? More importantly, why aren’t we hearing about it from the big investment banks, of which J.P. Morgan is the biggest player?
According to this New York Post article, Morgan has done an in-depth study and found that there is indeed a major muni-bond crisis heading our way. Morgan, however, decided to keep their report secret. Well, except for a few of their best clients. And Wall Street wonders why the public is so down on them.
Read. The. Whole. Post. There are big doin's in that post. Jim does a great job of analyzing the data...which is horrifying.
To be fair, a big issue here is that reporters who cover the whole country are loathe to discuss something that breaks down to a problem in 50 individual state and countless cities/towns. If you told your average New York Times or Boston Globe national news desk scribe about this, chances are they'd blow it off. 'This is a state issue', they'd likely say and not without some plausible deniability.
But that doesn't excuse the rest of the American chattering class. One gets a sense that the reporters who should be reporting this don't want to because talking about psychotic municipal debt makes the blue state model look absolutely abysmal. If there is one voting bloc that is deeply invested in massive welfare structures, big dumb government compassion and--most of all--generous public employee pay-outs, it is the mainstream media. Knowing this it's really not shocking why reporters would clam up when it comes to something this close to their hearts.
It's like expecting them to investigate Eric Holder for Fast & Furious. The leftist Attorney General hates the Second Amendment. The leftist American dinosaur media hates the Second Amendment. So what if Brian Terry is no longer available for comment? Eric Holder meant well, so that's close enough for Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Gail Collins. After all, it takes a lot of double-think if you wanna make it as an Obama-era court stenographer.
The looming municipal debt debacle is something most hacks just don't wanna talk about. So they won't. Until the problem annihilates state and local governments. Then it'll be Romney's fault.
