For years I was a guy who answered the questions of others for a living, but for a few years now I've become a guy who asks them instead. During that time I almost forgot what a useful site the Bureau of Labor Statistics is. The chart above comes from that site, and it gives a good window into the timing of future defaults and bankruptcies in the public pension system.
This is total union membership of course, so it's not a perfect fit. What you really need to know is union membership matched against percentage of public employees versus private. But it should stand as a fairly good proxy. For instance, NJ's Public Employee Retirement System is schedule to run out of money in about 4 years. Theoretically Chris Christie might forestall that a bit, but he's not a miracle worker. Short of seeing him walk across the Delaware and multiplying loaves and fishes, I'd bet against it.
But if you use that as a model and assume that the civil servants in California, Oregon, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Nevada, Connecticut and Wisconsin are no more responsible and competent than the civil servant in NJ, the same should be true (more or less) for them. New york and Washington, should see it slightly sooner.
But these are states. As I mentioned earlier today, we're already seeing municipal bankruptcies and pension defaults. And as the states begin to run even more short of money and begin to cut their distributions to local governments, you can expect those municipal defaults to happen much sooner. I would expect wide scale municipal pension defaults in the states mentioned above, as early as this year, no later than next. The states governments themselves, all of which will be applying for and getting bailouts from the feds - will likely take just a bit longer.
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