To be clear, I’m making an argument that’s different from “Government workers are overpaid.” I’m saying that they are paid in the wrong ways  in ways that make life easier on union leaders and elected officials, at least initially, but that eventually hurt both workers and taxpayers.

The best example is health insurance. Health plans for union workers and retirees are much more likely to require little or no co-payment, which leads to lots of medical treatments that don’t make people any healthier, and to huge costs. Ultimately, some of these plans will probably prove so expensive as to be unsustainable. Workers would have been better off accepting a less generous benefit package and slightly higher salaries.

The solution today is not to cut both the pay and the benefits of public workers, as would happen if workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere lost their right to bargain. Remember, public workers don’t get especially generous salaries. The solution is to get rid of the deferred benefits that make no sense  the wasteful health plans, the pensions that start at age 55 and still let retirees draw a full salary elsewhere, the definitions of disability that treat herniated discs as incurable.

These changes will help the states’ long-run budget problems, but of course they won’t address the immediate, recession-induced crisis. Dealing with the crisis will require dealing with the second failure of government: subpar performance.

On Tuesday, an auditor released a report showing that the federal government was wasting tens of billions of dollars on specific programs that accomplished little. Inefficiency is just as big a problem in state and local governments. Yet many public sector unions have been terribly short-sighted on this issue.

They have too often blocked attempts to make government work better. Instead, they have protected their worst-performing members, at the expense of both the taxpayers and the thousands of public workers who do their jobs well. Only recently, for instance, have teachers’ unions started to cooperate with serious efforts at teacher evaluation, and they are still not giving their full cooperation.

The tragedy  or maybe it’s the good news  is that the government really can become more efficient when it tries. Indiana, under Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, has had some success measuring its results and then improving them. (Mr. Daniels, less admirably, eliminated many state workers’ bargaining rights in 2005.) Washington State, under Democratic governors, has had success, too. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has made the federal government more productive in a variety of modest ways.