July 13, 2026

The below transcript is a translation of the podcast audio that has been machine generated by Adobe Podcast.

Hi everyone. This is Taylor St. Germain from ITR Economics. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of TrendsTalk. We at ITR are your apolitical and unbiased source of economic intelligence. And today I wanted to extend some of our previous TrendsTalk conversations as we look at some of these US states of opportunity. But I really wanted to zero in on the fiscal side of things here, which states are more fiscally resilient? Which states are less fiscally resilient? And I’ll give you just a teaser, the top five least risk states from a fiscal resiliency perspective, and I guess I should say, when we talk fiscal resiliency, it’s states with responsible and sustainable tax and spending policies, that’s really how we’re viewing this.

So the least risky states to be were Wyoming, Idaho, North Carolina, Utah and Florida. And again, this came from our recent webinar that will we’ll have a link to in TrendsTalk here. So those are the five least risk places to be. The five most at risk places to be in terms of fiscal resiliency, where Hawaii, Connecticut, California, D.C., we broke D.C. out on its own, Washington, D.C., and then Maryland. I’ll give you some supporting evidence for these trends here in terms of why some of the areas were less risky, why some were more risky. One of the metrics we looked at as we were doing this analysis was state and local government debt as a percent of GDP. So if we look at maybe the winner of this, it was Idaho. Idaho’s state and local government debt as a percent of state GDP was only 5.3%. And if we look at the worst state, it was actually Kentucky, coming in at about 20%. Now, this is very important to us in the context of 2030, to look at state and local government debt as a percent of GDP, because we believe national debt is going to be one of the drivers of this 2030 downturn. To give you a benchmark to compare to, when you look at the state and local government debt as a percent of GDP, the national average is about 10.5%, so anyone above 10.5% is more problematic. Again, you’ve got Kentucky at 20%, West Virginia at 19.4%, New York’s at 17.7%, California is at 15.2%. And then, despite all the positive press Texas gets, Texas is actually up there as well at 14.9%. Idaho and Wyoming, who are on our top five least risky places to be, were 5.3% and 5.7%, respectively. And there’s some other notables like North Carolina at 6.3%, Arizona 8%. So again, you want to be below that national average of 10.5%, and there are a number of states that are below, but there’s some we’re watching closely.

One of the other metrics that went into this fiscal resiliency was looking at Unfunded Pension Liability per capita by state. We actually saw New Jersey lead the way here at $11.8 thousand. Again, that’s debt per capita. Illinois was in a close worst second place, I should say at $11.7 thousand. And then you had some positives, which were if you looked at a Washington state, if you looked at South Dakota, New York, some of these areas were much better in terms of Unfunded Pension Liability per capita. The reason we’re evaluating, again, these different metrics is to better understand who’s going to face more of a crisis in 2030 as a result of the fiscal standing of a number of these states. And that’s especially important for the folks that we interact with that are looking for government type work, state and local contracts, some of our construction clients are in that public infrastructure space. It’s really important to understand the fiscal resiliency of some of these areas.

So again, top five riskiest places Hawaii, Connecticut, California, DC, Maryland. Bottom five least risk places to be, Wyoming, Idaho, North Carolina, Utah and Florida. Keep that in mind as you’re thinking about where the opportunities may lie, not just throughout the second half of this decade, but especially into that 2030 time frame. And again, if some of these areas that are on the least risk places to be, if they’re attractive to you, you want to start building your market share and building your presence in some of these areas now, not waiting until this downturn in 2030. And that’s a lot of our conversation with our clients, especially retail, consumer, construction related clients, is what areas are we in now and which areas do we want to be to really offset some of the pain that we see coming in the 2030s?

So again, head over to our website. Check out that webinar. We’ll link to it here in the show notes. Reach out to me with any questions or concerns that you might have, but it’s time that we really start taking this opportunity to prepare and diversify ourselves so we’re better equipped for what’s coming. Hope you found this information helpful. Thanks for joining me on this episode of TrendsTalk. Please like and subscribe to TrendsTalk wherever you listen to your podcasts. I look forward to seeing you on the next one. Thanks so much. Take care for now.