Got A Government Pension? Hope You Get Your Money. Some Don't

Prichard, Alabama may be a harbinger to come. The city's pension dried up and now the city's pensioners, who were promised a pension are instead getting the finger.
From the New York Times: This struggling small city on the outskirts of Mobile was warned for years that if it did nothing, its pension fund would run out of money by 2009. Right on schedule, its fund ran dry.
Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full.
Since then, Nettie Banks, 68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy. Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get to his new job as a police officer at the regional aiFar worse was the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too young to collect Social Security. “When they found him, he had no electricity and no running water in his house,” said David Anders, 58, a retired district fire chief. “He was a proud enough man that he wouldn’t accept help.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/business/23prichard.html?_r=1
Public pension plans are in desperate times. California and Illinois pensions? Dead pensions walking. If you start working for a government agency in those states, don't count on a pension. This includes Nevada's PERS along with numerous local government pension plans. Everyone is just whistling in the wind and pretending nothing bad is going to happen and then, bang, government pension fund will go belly up. what will happen? Will the governments raise taxes? Will they reduce payments to retirees, who were looking forward and budgeting the payments as they retire? Or will governments end up like Prichard, AL. and just stop out pensions? My guess there are going to be a lot more Prichard's out there in the near future.