So. Moody's puts it at $4.4T. ALEC puts it at $6T.

Mitchell and Friedberg warned that the pension hole will swallow public- and private-sector employees alike, because all income earners will pay for it. Mitchell ran a simple calculation to illustrate her point: If the shortfall were $5 trillion, divide that amount by the 158 million workers in the American labor force for an obligation of about $32,000 per worker.

That's not the $32k you may have saved for retirement. That's the amount that is going to have to be pickaxed out of you to pay for people who are retiring ahead of you. My kid's school district just eliminated 25 middle- and high-school English and Social Studies teachers to pay for a "budget shortfall."

In addition to the pension overhang, Friedberg noted, many states also face health insurance obligations that they aren’t adequately funding. Elected leaders are forced to increase taxes or cut spending to balance budgets thrown out of whack by pension debt, and the public workers are often vilified in the process.

Ask any Californian - there's no money left over for their kids because those greedy teachers are sipping champagne on their yachts because of the overly-generous pension we agreed to give them in exchange for them risking gunfire to teach algebra for $17k a year back in the '80s.

The report alluded to but not linked about property taxes and pension funding is behind a paywall but what it says, basically, is that the higher your property taxes, the better funded your municipal pensions tend to be. Which means the greater the shortfall, the higher the likelihood that property taxes will go up. Which is going to drive old people of means to retire out where things are rural and there are no pensions to support, which means housing affordability will go down in cities, which means a bunch of Olds out in the Hinterlands will continue voting their interests where they can overwhelm all the kids stacked on top of each other in the Tenderloin.