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The Retiree Math
Federal, state, county, and city pension systems face the same demographic pressures documented in LodiEye's companion analysis of Social Security and Medicare: an aging population, fertility below replacement since the early 1970s, and an immigration slowdown that reduces the working-age base every pension system assumes it will have. Unlike the federal trust funds, however, public pensions are prefunded in advance against dedicated investment portfolios — which means their near-term pressure shows up as rising required employer contributions rather than insolvency dates.
At the federal level, the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund carries a combined unfunded liability near $1 trillion that is projected to gradually decline through FY 2085. At the state level, CalPERS recovered to a 79 percent funded ratio after an 11.6 percent investment return in FY 2024–25, while CalSTRS reached 76.7 percent with the Defined Benefit Program on track for full funding by 2046. In San Joaquin County, SJCERA manages roughly $3 billion to $5 billion in assets across the county and nine other participating employers. In Lodi, CalPERS employer contributions are projected to rise from $20.9 million in FY 2025–26 to $24.6 million by FY 2031–32 — a 17.7 percent increase against a general fund already carrying a projected $4.8 million structural deficit over the next five years.
The Paying-In Generation
The United States now runs three demographic and fiscal clocks simultaneously: an aging population entering retirement at the fastest rate in the nation's history; a working-age population that has depended almost entirely on immigration for growth since 2019; and a federal debt service bill that is the fastest-growing line item in the budget and projected to more than double by 2036.
Current administration policies have contracted the second lever while enlarging the third — a combination that nonpartisan fiscal forecasters, including the Social Security Administration's own actuaries, project will accelerate the depletion of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. This report documents what the underlying data shows, using primary sources from the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security trustees, the Federal Reserve research banks, Penn Wharton, the Peterson Institute, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and ideologically varied policy research institutions.