You should see how they abused the dotcom bubble to push up their bogus projections:
"Davis, who was elected in 1998 with more than $5 million in campaign contributions from public employee unions, says that if he had it to do over, he would not support the pension improvements."
"... how in 1999 the California Public Employees’ Retirement System orchestrated the approval of a 50 percent retroactive pension increase for state employees amounts to an autopsy of a public-policy crime. It is literally incredible that CalPERS told the Legislature that such a huge gift of money would have little or no long-term cost to state taxpayers because the dot-com boom then driving the stock market sky-high would never end."
[2009] Californians questioning why their state budget is in perpetual red ink need look no further than the California Public Employees’ Retirement System’s (CalPERS) implicit forecast in 1999 that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would reach 25,000 by 2009, 595,000 by 2049 and 28 million by 2099 and that its investment earnings would rise alongside.
Yeah it is pretty bad. For a long time they were even projecting an 8.25% return according to the LA Times article I linked above. They used this number to justify the large benefit increases enacted when the stock market was doing well in the late 90s.
They made nowhere close to that and now state and local governments in California contribute over $50bn annually to CalPERS alone.
