Portland: Fourth worst city finances in the country

I've been griping for many years about how far in hock the City of Portland has put its taxpayers. Between all sorts of loans taken out for all sorts of junk, the wicked liability for cushy pensions for its army of civilian retirees, and the astonishing fact that its police and firefighter pension system is 0 percent funded (that's right, zero), Portland has always struck me as a place that's teetering on the edge of fiscal disaster.

For a while I was fixated on this. On my old blog, I kept up a debt clock showing the city's vast debts, and how much they amounted to per resident. The last time I checked the numbers was here, in June 2020. At one point years ago, I compared the situation with Seattle, and found that the Emerald City was a lot healthier from a money point of view.

I always wondered how other cities stacked up, but it would take more time than I ever had to look into it.

Well, now an alert reader has pointed me to this study, in which the University of Denver bean-counting experts who call themselves Truth in Accounting have surveyed the country's 75 largest cities to see how well they're doing financially, and lo and behold, Portland is the fourth worst. The only worse cities financially are New York City, Chicago, and Honolulu.

The methodology these guys use is similar to the crude amateur number-crunching I employed back when I was really trying to tackle this issue.

To simplify government finances, we break it down to a per-taxpayer level and calculate a single dollar amount called a Taxpayer Burden or Taxpayer Surplus. The Taxpayer Burden is the amount each taxpayer would have to pay to free the government of non-capital debt. We calculate this number by subtracting “total bills” from “assets available to pay bills,” and then take the resulting number, or “money needed to pay bills,” and divide it by the estimated number of the government’s taxpayers with a positive federal income tax liability (according to the IRS). Conversely, a Taxpayer Surplus is each taxpayer’s share of the government’s available assets after all bills have been paid.

Their use of the number of taxpayers, as opposed to the number of residents (which is what I was doing), makes sense. And since there are a lot fewer taxpayers than people, the dollar amount per head goes up quite a bit when you do it the Denver way. But remember, this is a comparative study of the cities, and that methodology was the same for all of them.

So here's the tale of their tape for Portland:

That $23,400 number is exceeded only by Honolulu at $26,100, Chicago at $41,900, and New York City at $56,900. Seattle checks in at a mere $100.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles has a surplus of $5,000 per taxpayer; and San Francisco, a surplus of $7,700 per taxpayer. That makes those two what the study calls "sunshine cities," as opposed to what Portland is, a "sinkhole city."

And these numbers are based on financial statements that show the cities' conditions 50 weeks ago. Portland's fortunes cannot have improved too much since then.

So it appears my worries over the decades have been well-founded. On top of everything else it's bungled, City Hall has put us in a precarious financial position. But hey, we're goin' by streetcar!