State government has made great progress in recent years toward funding its famously staggering unfunded pension and health care liabilities.

Most of the state's retirement plans have healthy funding levels, which is an achievement.

But taxpayers still face daunting liabilities that will pick their pockets for decades to come
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The Investment Management Board's Web site still shows the Teachers Retirement Fund only 51.3 percent funded, with a liability of almost $3.5 billion remaining. Filling those coffers will fall to taxpayers not yet born.

In addition, the state's municipal pension plans have a combined unfunded liability of about $659 million. West Virginia taxpayers and insurance policyholders are expected to come up with that money, too.

The bottom line is that West Virginians are going to be asked to part with more than $4 billion for state and municipal pensions - as well as billions of dollars' worth of health care benefits promised to public-sector retirees. 

Yet when legislators discuss pension liabilities, they tend to speak in terms of what the "stakeholders" will or will not stand for - without even mentioning the taxpaying and premium-paying public.

That is a miscasting of the situation.

West Virginia taxpayers are the largest stakeholders in these discussions. After all, it's their money - or it will have been, briefly.

When legislators discuss public-sector pensions, they need to discuss how to reposition those plans to limit the taxpayers' exposure in the future.

West Virginians want to be good and fair employers. They have no desire to shortchange public employees.

But public sector policymakers should root out excesses with respect to new hires.

Many private-sector workers have already lost part of their pension and retiree health benefits as corporations struggled to reinvent themselves.

If the public sector refuses to make similar prudent changes, it is in for a rocky relationship with the taxpaying public.

They could have used that $4 billion themselves.