Heather Gillers
speaker
548 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2018
last heard Oct 2021
Heather Gillers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
That's really key here.
I mean, it's hard to overestimate the damage to governments as a result of the recession.
And so even though there were 10 years of real growth,
The hole that many cities were in and the debt that they were carrying on their books made it really difficult, even through a 10-year recovery, to get back to a really comfortable place of fiscal stability.
In our story, we spotlight a town called Harvey, Illinois, where the deterioration really began 50 years ago in the 70s and 80s when factories started closing, people started moving away.
That town took a really serious hit in the recession and then was able to hang on through the past decade as revenue started to go up, jobs started to go up.
Those types of growth factors helped the city paper over really severe increases in liability and deterioration in property values, which have never recovered from the recession before.
Now the city is starting to see contraction again.
And as the mayor put it, his problem is that he now has to do more with less.
In places where you're seeing population growth or businesses moving in, they've really been able to confront these problems of debt and liability head on.
And so you look at a city like Austin, which actually has pretty substantial pension obligations and recently borrowed in order to
to address those obligations, that's the kind of thing that in a more distressed city would probably cause a downgrade, maybe from a rating agency, people would begin to doubt its creditworthiness.
But in Austin, because there's sort of a light at the end of the tunnel, you actually had a ratings firm improve its assessment of their creditworthiness
because despite the burdensome liabilities, there's sort of a clear path forward and out of the situation.
Sure.
Anytime.
Overwhelmingly, it was coming from affluent
taxpayers in higher tax states.
So California, probably most of all, also places like New York, New Jersey.
And that's because the 2017 tax overhaul placed limits on how much taxpayers could deduct from their federal tax bills based on the amount of state and local taxes they were paying.
Showing 281–300 of 548 · page 15 of 28
← Previous
Next →