Jesse Hathaway of the Heartland Institute writes for the Washington Examiner about long-term problems facing government pension programs across the 50 states.

Tick, tick, tick …

That’s the sound of a bomb getting ready to go off, one with the power to destroy taxpayers’ lives and state budgets. This explosive is a “future bomb,” set to blow up at a later, unknown date. But it’s just as dangerous and deserving of our attention as any immediate threat.

For decades, state lawmakers and pension boards have been cooking the books and making the funds they manage appear to be more financially sound than they really are, creating a fiscal time bomb that will explode if policymakers don’t work immediately to solve the problem they’ve created.

Resistance to pension-fund reform ideas, such as shifting from defined-benefit programs to 401(k)-like defined-contribution plans, has accelerated the bomb’s detonation by ruling out the only way pensioners can be sure their benefits are there when they need them to be.

In 2016, Moody’s Investors Service published a report adding up the value of states’ net pension liabilities for the 2015 fiscal year. The bomb is primed to explode, researchers found.

“Total US state aggregate adjusted net pension liabilities (ANPL) totaled $1.25 trillion, or 119% of revenue in fiscal 2015 … The results, based on compliance with new GASB 68 accounting rules, set a new ANPL baseline and are poised to rise for the next two fiscal years as market returns fall below annual targets.”