There is a looming danger in the unsustainable growth of our state government: The unfunded liabilities for the pensions and health benefits of retired state workers are now estimated at $23 billion, and the prospect is for the debt to continue increasing.

Certainly, public sector workers deserve competitive wages and benefits. But those same public sector workers could end up paying a steep price when massive cuts in state government spending are made to pay off state debt.

This $23 billion debt not only jeopardizes the retirement plans of current and former government workers, it also could soon take money away from vital state and county services such as police, fire, education and other social services.

Whenever government salaries go up, so does the debt, and this system has led to the highest level of unfunded liabilities in the history of the state.

In the past decade, benefits for public employees in the state have risen five times faster than in the private sector, and this has worsened the pension debt crisis.

Hawaii taxpayers are footing 76 percent of the bill for government workers’ pensions and health care, despite those workers making up only 15 percent of the total workforce. This means that private sector workers, who are struggling to save for their own retirements, are also paying the retirements for public workers.

Pensioners are worried about their toppling retirement plans. Younger government workers are forced to pay into a pension system that makes promises it cannot fulfill. Taxpayers pay more each year, but the debt continues to rise. And Hawaii’s most vulnerable citizens are seeing public services cut to make room for growing public pension costs.

At the heart of the problem is Hawaii’s broken defined-benefit pension system, which gives employees benefits regardless of how much money was put into the system. But this creates the spiraling debt problem.

Hawaii should adopt reforms that have saved pension systems in more than a dozen states across the country, including Florida, Colorado, Montana, South Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Michigan and Alaska, which now offer defined-contribution plans, rather than defined-benefit plans, to their government pensioners.

Defined contribution plans match money going in with money going out, so the books are balanced. Switching to a self-managed, defined-contribution retirement plan would end the pension crisis, while providing public workers with an increasingly stable and secure retirement plan.

Unless we make a fundamental change in our pension system, the state is going to be saddled with this debt for decades to come. Moreover, that debt will grow until it threatens not only government programs and services, but the jobs and retirement benefits of the workers themselves.

It is in the best interest of the state to ensure that our public sector workers are well provided for. But it is in everyone’s interest — state employees included — to make sure that we are not building a house of cards.

Keli’i Akina, Ph.D., is CEO of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. He wrote this in his capacity as a private citizen.