If you’ve been to West Virginia, you probably remember similarities to Maine: vast natural beauty, small towns, friendly people.

It’s also a place where good jobs are tough to find and people in its most rural corners scramble to eke out a living.

Maine and West Virginia also share a similar problem — seriously underfunded public employee pension systems.

In West Virginia, the total unfunded liability is about $7.4 billion. The liability here is about $4.1 billion.

While our total owed is smaller, so is our population — 1.3 million people in Maine vs. 1.8 million in West Virginia.

As a result, our per capita debt liability — meaning how much we would all have to pony up to pay up — narrows the comparison. It’s about $4,000 in West Virgina and about $3,000 in Maine.

But West Virginia has at least begun doing something about the ongoing growth of its pension debt. Last week it cut out retiree health care benefits to newly hired state workers and public school teachers.

Other states are doing the same in response to an estimated $1 trillion national shortfall between what states have promised to pay their future retirees and what they have saved to pay it.

New Jersey Gov. John Christie, meanwhile, has criticized state employee unions, claiming lifetime health care benefits have simply become unaffordable.

In the private sector, post-retirement benefits of any kind have all but disappeared as employers shifted workers from “defined benefit” systems like pensions to “defined contribution” plans like 401(k)s.

And retiree health care? Well, that’s now Medicare and whatever supplemental plan a retiree can afford.

The result is a growing and unsustainable benefit gap between the private and public sector.

Years ago, the argument was that generous benefit programs were necessary to make up for generally lower pay in the public sector.

That’s no longer the case. Pay in public sector jobs often exceeds competitive private-sector employment.

What’s more, many public employees can claim lifetime retirement benefits after 25 or 30 years of work, meaning they can collect government checks for life while going on to second careers or starting their own businesses.

Maine will rapidly reach a breaking point over the next couple of years. Retiree benefit costs are scheduled to explode, while tax revenue is expected to grow much more slowly.

The crisis was averted in the last legislative session by a big injection of federal stimulus funding and by slashing contributions to municipalities and schools.

Payments to Maine’s retirement system will total $458 million in the next year, up from $314.5 million this year, a 45 percent increase. By 2019, the annual payment will be $800 million.

The challenge for Maine’s legislators will be severe — to fund state services and revenue sharing to municipalities and schools, while meeting increasing pension obligations and not increasing taxes.

Shades of Mission Impossible.

But the first step going forward would be to follow West Virginia’s lead and stop making undeliverable promises to new public employees.

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