recover from the historic economic downturns of the Dot-Com Crash, Great Recession and the Covid-19 Pandemic. In financial terms, the "crisis" represents the gap between the amount of promised benefits and the resources set aside to pay for them. For example, many U.S. states have underfunded pensions, meaning the state has not contributed the amount estimated to be necessary to pay future obligations to retired workers. Equable Institute reported in July 2022 that U.S. state and local pension plans have promised $6.3 Trillion in benefits, but only have $4.9 Trillion in assets to pay for these benefits — an estimated $1.4 trillion shortfall. Due to unprecedented market volatility, the aggregated funded ratio for state and local pension plans is 77.9% as of July 2022, down from 84.8% in 2021, representing the largest decline in funded ratio since the Great Recession. However, since state and local plans are managed independently from one another, the scale of the challenges facing pension funds varies widely by state. The image below shows the 2021 and 2022 funded ratios of states as of July 2022 — illustrating both the spectrum of pension health in the US and the impact of market volatility on funded ratio. Funded ratios alone, however, aren’t the only way to measure the scale of the funding challenges facing pension funds. The size of unfunded liabilities relative to the size of a state’s GPD, provides a sense of the scale of resources that are needed to restore retirement systems to full funding. By this metric, Illinois, Kentucky and New Jersey are the states most economically burdened by their unfunded liabilities. Conversely, Nebraska, Utah, New York and Idaho’s retirement systems represent a negligible impact to their states’ economic demands, as they have been able to maintain fully-funded status. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reported in January 2011 that: , the state pension shortfall ranges between $700 billion and $3 trillion, depending on the discount rate used to value the future obligations. The $700 billion figure is based on using a discount rate in the 8% range representative of historical pension fund investment returns, while the $3 trillion represents a discount rate in the 5% range representative of historical Treasury bond ("risk-free") yields. This shortfall emerged after the year 2000, substantially due to tax revenue declines from two recessions. States contribute approximately 3.8% of their operating budgets to their pension programs