Some readers might recall the recent editorial cartoon that featured this dialogue between two guys sitting at a bar, “Public Sector” and “Private Sector.”

Public Sector: “They’re trying to cut our pensions.”

Private Sector: “What’s a pension?”

It was funny. Or maybe not so funny — not to private-sector employees who have surrendered pension and health care benefits to help keep financially devastated employers afloat, or who saw their retirement savings wiped out in the 2008 financial collapse.

Not so funny, either, to state workers and public school teachers facing the prospect of reduced retirement benefits and heftier employee contributions toward benefit programs.

The cartoon would have to be considered “black humor,” a form that is popular among cynics but more often than not is funny only to those who aren’t targets of the joke.

There was a valid point to be made, however. Private-sector employees have been hit hard in recent years by the struggling economy, suffering layoffs, pay cuts, reductions in benefits and, in some cases, evaporation of retirement plans that they had come to believe would ride a wave of perpetual growth.

Many of these folks have had to delay retirement; chances are, some will never be able to retire. Others will retire, but won’t enjoy any semblance of the comfortable lifestyle they expected. And now, the pain has been extended to employees in the public sector — particularly state workers and school teachers — and the uproar can be heard from coast to coast.

In some states — notably Wisconsin and Ohio — public employees are facing not only major cuts in benefits but also significant restrictions on their ability to bargain collectively through their unions. Republican governors and Legislatures in those states have vowed to bring government spending under control, and to do it in large part by cutting employee benefit plans that are so expensive they threaten to leave the states unable to provide vital public services.

Here in Maine, the situation is not quite so dire — but we could get there, if we don’t take meaningful steps to rein in these costs. Gov. LePage has proposed such steps as part of a comprehensive plan to put the state on solid financial footing and set the stage for the economic growth that is essential if Maine is to maintain its admirable quality of life and achieve a competitive standard of living.

The governor’s proposed cuts to employee and retiree benefits are reasonable and even modest when compared with those being sought in other states. His plan addresses the long-standing and potentially devastating unfunded liability in the state’s pension program and contains the cost of retiree health care, which is an increasingly troublesome expense.

These are changes that simply must be made, and it is distressing that the proposals are being protested as if they were a draconian assault on the well-being of the state’s retirees.

Worse, the protests have sometimes taken the trite and tedious form of “class warfare,” with anti-LePage protesters complaining that the governor wants to cut taxes for the rich while balancing the budget on the backs of state workers. In fact, LePage has devised a budget that provides desperately needed tax relief to spur the state’s laggard economy and also addresses rampaging pension costs that can no longer be ignored.

One frustrated state employee certainly got our attention at a State House hearing on the governor’s budget last week when she asserted that “I am not the problem and I am not the enemy in this budget crisis “

We concur. State workers and retirees are not the enemy and they are not, per se, the problem — although their benefits are a substantial and challenging element of the problem.

Supporters of the governor’s proposed reductions must be careful not to demonize state workers and school teachers, most of whom are dedicated public servants who understand the state’s need for fiscal stability and are willing to shoulder their share of the burden. If anything, the wrath of angry taxpayers should be aimed at politicians and bureaucrats who agreed to costly benefits over the years without giving sufficient attention to the financial consequences those benefits would eventually impose.

It’s a pattern that continues to threaten the nation as Congress and the president pay lip service to the concept of debt reduction — while ignoring the looming crisis presented by the ever-rising costs of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Maine has a chance to reverse the trend, to start — and it is only a start — making a conscientious and significant effort to control costs that for far too long have been out of control. We also have a chance to set an example for the rest of the country by making these changes in a mature and dignified manner.

The changes are reasonable. The people affected by them should be reasonable as well.