The current low interest rates are keeping the federal deficit lower than it would otherwise be, but making a bad situation worse for pension funds.
It would be useful to know what percentage of the average pension fund’s investments are in federal government bonds. To a rather scary degree, it has become a sort of financial circle jerk, if you will pardon the colloquialism.
Funded portions of the pensions are “invested” somewhere. That means that if investments lose value the pension’s funded percentage will drop. The portion that is US government bonds is, in a manner of speaking, a tax payer bailout in advance, since the only value the bonds have is a promise by the government to confiscate taxpayer assets to pay the returns.