Forty U.S. states do not have enough money to pay all their bills primarily due to significant unfunded pensions or Other-Post-Employment Benefits (OPEB).  (TIA), a nonpartisan, not-for-profit has been monitoring the financial health of states for a decade in order to educate taxpayers about the financial health of their states today released its tenth annual Financial State of the States.

Since they published “” last year, total U.S. states debt decreased slightly, less than 1%, from $1.5 trillion at the end of the fiscal year 2017, to $1.49 trillion in fiscal year 2018. Truth in Accounting’s 2018 data shows that unfunded retirement liabilities are the main contributing factor to the almost $1.5 trillion in state-level debt. Unfortunately, “one of the ways states make their budgets look balanced is by shortchanging public pension and OPEB [other post-employment benefit] funds. This practice has resulted in a $824 billion shortfall in pension funds and a $664.6 billion shortfall in OPEB funds.”

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