The national debt is bad. But state debt may be even worse.

What do the following states have in common? California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania.

There are three correct answers. First, they are all deep blue states that have been under the control of Democrats for decades (OK, Colorado went blue fairly recently). Second, they all run huge budget deficits. And third, they’re all in serious debt.

On average these states owe $18,800 for every citizen living in them. That per capita debt is rising every year.

To put that in perspective, the per capita in deep red Texas is only $4,500. In now even deeper red Florida, it’s a thousand dollars less.

Politicians in these blue states have figured out that they can buy today’s votes – and thus gain the power and perks of office – with tomorrow’s money. Tomorrow being when the sovereign debt that they incur for lavish, vote-buying social spending has to be repaid.

Since they won’t be in office when the bill comes due, it’s essentially free money.

It gets worse. The social programs funded by all this borrowing are almost always poorly managed and almost always fall far short of addressing whatever the problem was that led to their creation.

But wait, it gets worse still. Massive social programs are magnets for massive fraud. Here’s an example. Though the problem was known as far back as 2022, the story of staggering fraud surrounding an organization called, “Feeding Our Future” in Minnesota became national headline news in late 2025. Staggering is too weak an adjective. Mind bending might be better.

Feeding Our Future was what is called a “sponsor organization” whose purported purpose was to use government funding to provide meals to children living in poverty, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. But instead of feeding children, the organization submitted bills to the government to the tune of about $9 billion for meals that were never provided. The money went to Feeding Our Future principals who instead used it to buy luxury homes, commercial real estate, cars and jewelry. And, because the whole thing was run by Somali immigrants, a lot of the money also wound up being offshored to Somalia where it is credibly alleged to have funded terrorism.

Fallout from the Minnesota story became the catalyst for exposing similar fraud schemes in New York, Illinois and elsewhere.

The United States of America is $39 trillion in debt. That is a real problem and bad on its face.

But the debt burdens being carried by deep blue states could actually be worse. There is no mechanism in the Constitution or under federal law by which a state can declare bankruptcy. If a state can’t pay its sovereign debt, there’s no way to fix it.

And when more than 100 percent of a state’s tax revenue is soaked up by debt service, who do you guess will suffer first and suffer most?

If you guessed the poor who are dependent on the debt-funded government programs that politicians used to buy their votes, you guessed correctly.