President George W. Bush has been stumping the country, campaign style, trying to build support for reforming Social Security. The problem, according to Bush, is that within two decades or so, more money will be going out of the Social Security program than will be coming in by way of tax revenues.

Several proposals have emerged to keep the program solvent, including: partial privatization to increase investment returns, lifting the cap on taxable income, increasing the retirement age and slowing the growth of benefits.

The basic problem, which is exacerbated by the retirement of the massive baby boom generation, is that promised benefits will exceed tax income for the pay-as-you-go program.

Generically described as an unfunded pension liability, Social Security's coming shortfall is seen by some as a crisis to be dealt with now, and by others as merely a problem that can be resolved with minor changes.

But many analysts are more concerned about other unfunded pension liabilities - namely those promised to state and municipal workers across the United States.

Performing a Google search on "unfunded pension liability" returns more than 120,000 hits featuring articles or reports from various states and U.S. cities, along with Canadian provinces and foreign countries such as England, Japan and Germany.

The unfunded pension problem appears to be widespread - and serious.

Most people are familiar with the under-funded pension liabilities of major U.S. corporations. Many well-known U.S. companies, particularly in the steel, automotive and airline industries, are facing multibillion-dollar shortfalls in their pension funds - the benefits promised to retirees outstrip the money set aside to pay for those benefits. These companies struggle to compete in the marketplace, while at the same time diverting precious resources by increasing their contributions to their pension funds.

In some cases, companies have been unable to compete and have declared bankruptcy, dumping their pension obligations to the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which, itself, is rapidly reaching an under-funding crisis.

What most people don't realize is that a similar situation exists in many of the 6,000 pension plans covering workers employed by state, county and city governments across America.

There are several key ingredients to the current pension crisis.

Too often, government workers have been promised overly generous pension benefits, which far outstripped pension benefits offered to comparable workers in the private sector. The generous retirement benefits offered to members of Congress and many state legislatures are a good example of this situation.

Government workers' pay has generally grown at about the rate of inflation, or slightly more. Benefits, however, particularly pension benefits, have grown at a much higher rate. One reason this can happen is that salary hikes are immediate expenses and generally well understood because they are widely reported in the media. But pension hikes are often buried in fine print and won't actually have to be paid until sometime in the future.

Sometimes benefits are promised without the ability to pay for them.

Some observers have suggested major domestic steel companies agreed to generous pension and benefit packages when times were good, not realizing that the good times would not last. Government pension funds have had the same problem, with the booming stock market of the later 1990s enticing some government entities to expect similarly high rates of return, and thus make pension promises that assumed strong stock market performance.

When the recent stock market bubble burst, pension-funding gaps appeared that can only be made up by massive tax increases.

Solutions to unfunded pension obligations are few - and either optimistic or unpleasant - hope for better stock market returns, or increase contributions, which in a private company diverts money from other purposes and reduces profits and in case of government results in higher taxes.

This crisis must be faced and solutions other than massive tax hikes, such a roll back of benefits or conversion to defined contribution plans, must be found. The crisis in Social Security is beginning to look like a picnic when compared to the broader unfunded pension liabilities waiting to explode.