Just for fun (come on, you know you do it, too), I thought I’d go through the audits for the State of Rhode Island and the cities and towns contained therein to total up the amount of debt.  The exercise wasn’t intended to be comprehensive, so I just grabbed, as well as I was able, the long-term debt or liabilities from each government’s statement of net position (including the current portion for long-term liabilities).  The numbers therefore capture pensions, other post employment benefits (OPEB), bonded debt, and other ways in which a town, city, or state can owe somebody money.

The numbers therefore are extremely conservative.  The incentive, for governments, is to minimize the amount of money that it looks like they’re spending, and truly cutting through the methods for answering that incentive would be a very significant project.  One notes on the audits, for example, that some portion of pension debt is calculated as a “deferred outflow” rather than a liability, and so would not be included; in Cranston, for example, the deferred outflow for pensions is $36.6 million, while the liability is listed as $1.5 million.  (There is typically a deferred inflow, too, but even subtracting in from out tends to produce a greater liability; $1.8 million in Cranston.) Remember, too, that the calculations that government auditors use to figure pension and OPEB liabilities can underestimate a more-realistic assessment of liability by four or five times.  Oh, and none of this includes other government units that might not fall under these specific audits, such as fire and water districts.

Consequently, the $16 billion total that this method produces is pretty much the absolute minimum that governments in Rhode Island have saddled residents with.  Using the latest U.S. Census data provided by the state Dept. of Labor and Training, this comes out to $15,180 for every person in the state, or 27.3% of the total annual income of Rhode Islanders.

If you want to darken your financial picture, for some reason, add that amount to the $154,000 or so each of us owes for the federal debt.  Then factor in entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare… and don’t forget to adjust everything up for accounting gimmicks and understatements, as with pensions.

In short, the $16 billion of acknowledged debt in Rhode Island is just the tiniest tip of an iceberg of hopeless proportions.  Don’t fall for the distractions, either: The bill is going to come due, and somebody is going to get shafted.