Kevin Williamson’s cover story in the new issue (June 21, 2010) is the kind of great reporting and analysis that are the hallmarks of National Review. Here’s a taste — we join the essay in progress:

. . . So that’s $14 trillion in federal debt and $2.5 trillion in state and local debt: $16.5 trillion. But I’ve got some bad news for you, Sunshine: We haven’t even hit all the big-ticket items.
One of the biggest is the pension payments owed to government workers. And here’s where the state-and-local story actually gets quite a bit worse than what’s happening in Washington—it’s the sort of thing that might make you rethink that whole federalism business. While the federal government runs a reasonably well-administered retirement program for its workers, the states, in their capacity as the laboratories of democracy, have been running a mad-scientist experiment in their pension funds, making huge promises but skipping the part where they sock away the money to pay for them. Every year, the pension funds’ actuaries calculate how much money must be saved and invested that year to fund future benefits, and every year the fund managers ignore them. In 2009, for instance, the New Jersey public-school teachers’ pension system invested just 6 percent of the amount of money its actuaries calculated was needed. And New Jersey is hardly alone in this. With a handful of exceptions, practically every state’s pension fund is poised to run out of money in the coming decades. A federal bailout is almost inevitable, which means that those state obligations will probably end up on the national balance sheet in one form or another.

Of course there is much more, and anyway, the cover gives away the bottom line to all this accumulated fiscal madness (you may want to read it with a quart of gin to numb the pain). But friends, you really ought to read the Williamson essay, and the other great pieces in the new issue (by Mark Steyn, Jay Nordlinger, Ramesh Ponnuru, Rob Long, Reihan Salam, Mark Krikorian, Andy McCarthy, James Pinkerton, Ross Douthat, John Derbyshire, and many more top writers), and to do that you must subscribe. A full year of NR (24 fortnightly issues) costs $59, but you can get it for half price, and get a free booklet too. Subscribe here. And as for the digital edition, it’s only $21.95 for a full year! Subscribe to NRDigital here.