Are depression-era services now bankrupting recession-era states?

In the discussion of our nation’s growing debt, there’s an issue that may be going largely unreported in the wash of discussion of the federal deficit. All across the country, smaller budgets ?– county, municipal and state — struggle to pay for underfunded civic services. Is it possible that the services we’ve come to depend on since the New Deal are, in fact, acting as an ?architecture of debt??

We speak with WNYC Senior Reporter Bob Hennelly, who has been reporting on the important relationship between debt on local and state levels; and Amity Shlaes, Senior Fellow for Economic History at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.