(Just The News)—A large majority of the 75 largest cities in the U.S. are in financial trouble, according to a new report.
Truth in Accounting released the report, which evaluated the 75 largest cities in the country, arguing that the majority of cities have financial problems and owe thousands of dollars in debt per taxpayer.
“This means that to claim their budgets were balanced – as is required by law in the 75 cities – elected officials have not included the full cost of the government in their budget calculations and have pushed costs onto future taxpayers,” the report said.
The group came to these numbers by taking into account financial obligations cities do not always consider in their budgeting.
Truth In Accounting has called on Congress to adopt full accrual accounting, which “provides a far more complete and transparent picture of financial performance. It accounts for all financial obligations – both current and future – by recognizing expenses when they are incurred rather than when cash changes hands.”
The group argues that the published debt figures for local, state and federal governments are misleading and actually much higher when you consider other factors like future unfunded liabilities.
For example, the federal government reports its national debt at around $36 trillion; Truth in Accounting says it is actually about 4.5 five times larger.
According to the report, retiree health benefits and pensions are a major weight around the necks of many city budgets, dragging them into debt.
“The 75 cities had $321 billion worth of assets available to pay bills; their debt, including unfunded retirement benefit promises, amounted to $621.7 billion,” the report added. “Pension debt totaled $192.1 billion, and other postemployment benefits (OPEB), mainly retiree health care, totaled $136.4 billion.
The report evaluated the cities as of fiscal year 2023. It found New York City as the worst city fiscally, followed by Chicago, Portland, New Orleans and Honolulu. The best city came in as Washington, D.C., followed by Lincoln, Irvine, Tampa and Cleveland.
“This year’s research indicates that as the U.S. economy continues to recover, cities have reported revenues surpassing their expenses,” the report said. “However, the growing burden of unfunded pension and retiree healthcare liabilities has overshadowed these financial gains. These liabilities now account for more than half of the cities’ non-capital debt and are laden with risks and uncertainties that often lie beyond the control of legislators, taxpayers, and even those managing the plans.”
From the report:
The uncertainty surrounding estimated future benefit payments is significant, as it depends on unpredictable factors such as life expectancy, inflation rates, healthcare costs, and investment performance. Even small changes in these assumptions can drastically alter the total future liabilities. For example, in more than 20 cities, a reduction in the discount rate – the interest rate used to determine the amount of money needed today to cover future benefits – resulted in a notable decrease in the dollar amount of unfunded retiree healthcare benefits.
Cities without funds set aside for these benefits are assumed to need to borrow money to cover the costs, meaning the discount rate must reflect the borrowing rate the government would face. This reduction in the discount rate was driven by the Federal Reserve’s decision to lower interest rates, which in turn led to a notable decrease in the rate at which governments could borrow money. The variability in these assumptions makes it challenging for cities to plan accurately for future obligations, further complicating efforts to ensure sufficient funding.
The report found that most cities have debt and therefore a taxpayer burden on its residents, while some have a taxpayer surplus, a number many local officials would likely dispute given the different accounting standards.
Here are all of the cities with Truth in Accounting’s reported surplus or burden (note, the dollars listed below are per each taxpayer in the cities):
- Albuquerque, N.M. Taxpayer Burden: $4,000
- Anaheim, Calif. Taxpayer Burden: $5,100
- Anchorage, Alaska Taxpayer Burden: $1,000
- Arlington, Texas Taxpayer Surplus: $1,500
- Atlanta, Ga. Taxpayer Burden: $3,100
- Aurora, Colo. Taxpayer Surplus: $2,800
- Austin, Texas Taxpayer Burden: $11,700
- Bakersfield, Calif. Taxpayer Surplus: $800
- Baltimore, Md. Taxpayer Burden: $14,400
- Boston, Mass. Taxpayer Burden: $10,600
- Charlotte, N.C. Taxpayer Surplus: $1,000
- Chicago, Ill. Taxpayer Burden: $40,600
- Chula Vista, Calif. Taxpayer Burden: $600
- Cincinnati, Ohio Taxpayer Burden: $13,400
- Cleveland, Ohio Taxpayer Surplus: $2,900
- Colorado Springs, Colo. Taxpayer Surplus: $800
- Columbus, Ohio Taxpayer Burden: $2,000
- Corpus Christi, Texas Taxpayer Surplus: $400
- Dallas, Texas Taxpayer Burden: $13,300
- Denver, Colo. Taxpayer Burden: $15
- Detroit, Mich. Taxpayer Burden: $1,600
- El Paso, Texas Taxpayer Burden: $2,300
- Fort Wayne, Ind. Taxpayer Surplus: $200
- Fort Worth, Texas Taxpayer Burden: $4,100
- Fresno, Calif. Taxpayer Surplus: $2,700
- Greensboro, N.C. Taxpayer Burden: $1,100
- Henderson, Nev. Taxpayer Burden: $1,200
- Honolulu, Hawaii Taxpayer Burden: $17,400
- Houston, Texas Taxpayer Burden: $5,700
- Indianapolis, Ind. Taxpayer Burden: $3,600
- Irvine, Calif. Taxpayer Surplus: $4,200
- Jacksonville, Fla. Taxpayer Burden: $9,800
- Kansas City, Mo. Taxpayer Burden: $8,800
- Las Vegas, Nev. Taxpayer Burden: $500
- Lexington, Ky. Taxpayer Burden: $5,500
- Lincoln, Neb. Taxpayer Surplus: $4,300
- Long Beach, Calif. Taxpayer Burden: $1,800
- Los Angeles, Calif. Taxpayer Burden: $1,000
- Louisville, Ky. Taxpayer Surplus: $2,600
- Memphis, Tenn. Taxpayer Burden: $9,100
- Mesa, Ariz. Taxpayer Burden: $4,000
- Miami, Fla. Taxpayer Burden: $13,400
- Milwaukee, Wis. Taxpayer Burden: $15,100
- Minneapolis, Minn. Taxpayer Burden: $600
- Nashville, Tenn. Taxpayer Burden: $1,600
- New Orleans, La. Taxpayer Burden: $18,300
- New York City, N.Y. Taxpayer Burden: $56,800
- Oakland, Calif. Taxpayer Burden: $7,800
- Oklahoma City, Okla. Taxpayer Surplus: $2,900
- Omaha, Neb. Taxpayer Burden: $6,400
- Orlando, Fla. Taxpayer Surplus: $300
- Philadelphia, Penn. Taxpayer Burden: $17,300
- Phoenix, Ariz. Taxpayer Burden: $3,200
- Pittsburgh, Penn. Taxpayer Burden: $10,500
- Plano, Texas Taxpayer Surplus: $2,300
- Portland, Ore. Taxpayer Burden: $18,600
- Raleigh, N.C. Taxpayer Surplus: $2,700
- Riverside, Calif. Taxpayer Burden: $1,700
- Sacramento, Calif. Taxpayer Burden: $2,500
- Saint Paul, Minn. Taxpayer Burden: $4,200
- San Antonio, Texas Taxpayer Burden: $1,400
- San Diego, Calif. Taxpayer Burden: $3,900
- San Francisco, Calif. Taxpayer Burden: $12,800
- San Jose, Calif. Taxpayer Burden: $6,700
- Santa Ana, Calif. Taxpayer Burden: $5,400
- Seattle, Wash. Taxpayer Burden: $1,700
- St. Louis, Mo. Taxpayer Burden: $9,800
- Stockton, Cailf. Taxpayer Burden: $1,000
- Tampa, Fla. Taxpayer Surplus: $3,400
- Toledo, Ohio Taxpayer Burden: $2,200
- Tucson, Ariz. Taxpayer Burden: $6,900
- Tulsa, Okla. Taxpayer Surplus: $200
- Virginia Beach, Va. Taxpayer Surplus: $25
- Washington, D.C. Taxpayer Surplus: $9,000
- Wichita, Kan. Taxpayer Surplus: $700
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
