Taxpayer Bailout of State Pension Plans?

A recent CNN/Money article suggests that state pension plans will need a bailout from the federal government in the coming years.

"This is a problem of monumental proportion," said Rauh, an assistant professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management. "Given that we see the same issue in many states, the total size of a federal rescue plan could exceed the seriousness of the recent economic crisis and potentially cost more than $1 trillion total."

Let's see if I have this right. States are either unable or unwilling to raise enough taxes from their own residents to make their pension plans solvent. So, instead, they may want the federal government to tax those same people, and then transfer the money back to the states?

Huh?

Here's a better idea. How about the states that have massive pension shortfalls simply reduce the defined benefits that have been promised to state workers to a degree that the pension plans are, voila, no longer insolvent?

Annual compensation (i.e., salaries and benefits) for workers at the federal and state level are already significantly higher than pay for workers doing similar jobs within the private sector.

Simply put, there is simply no plausible reason that the fatcats working for government should be bailed out at the expense of the rest of us.