This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 1st, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

State governments are beginning to discover that their generous promises to state workers over recent decades

may put them into the red sooner rather than later.

But it's not clear that those same governments, even as fiscal crises loom, are terribly interested in getting good information.

Andrew Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and former

Social Security analyst at the Cato Institute.

We spoke last week.

What's been going on in Greece?

It recently, I think, has a lot of instruction to offer states in dealing with what at first blush seems to be a fairly

intractable problem that is the the decades that politicians have been able to

separate the political benefits of promising over generous pensions and the

actual fiscal costs that are just now beginning to to really come due.

How do you think about that problem? The states are... to really come do.

How do you think about that problem?

The states are lucky in one sense that they can look abroad at countries like Greece and

see what the future holds for them.

A principal problem facing the states isn't their ordinary budget

deficits of debt. Those are not extremely high. States though offer very generous benefits to public sector workers, people who work

for state and local governments, and these benefits have not been adequately funded.

Principally we're thinking here of defined benefit, pension

benefits, and health benefits for retirees.

The states have not gone nearly far enough in funding these programs.

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