Important votes on pension and tax proposals will take place over the next few months. A lot of fog is already being produced. The most diligent is the SP. She has every reason to.
The number of retirees will increase sharply in the next few years, which will make it more difficult to finance pensions securely and fairly.
Plus is minus and more is less. Even the rules of mathematics falter when the united left can once again campaign against the evil capitalists. The number jugglers, the arithmetic artists, the case study acrobats: they are all ready. Your skills will be in demand in the near future. The program includes contested votes on social and tax policy issues: on February 13th it will be about stamp duties, in September it will be about the AHV and probably also about withholding tax.
A kind of preview took place in Bern on Tuesday. The SP, the Greens and the trade unions have verbally launched the referendum against the AHV reform, which would stabilize the important social welfare organization for a few years. The shrill tones have eliminated any last doubts: The left is warming up to stage a class struggle that in the real Swiss social and tax state can almost only be interpreted as necromancy.
Or as a calculation. Primarily the SP has every reason to crank it up rhetorically. A year before the elections, the starving party can finally shine again in its parade disciplines: tax issues, social security, distribution policy. So far she has had less luck. The SP is divided on the European question, and the Greens stand in front of the sun on climate policy. The relief that these issues are temporarily taking a back seat is probably only as great in the FDP as in the SP.
Maximum ideological
The comrades want to seize their chance. The Greens keep up, the unions anyway. And so the compact red-green camp is preparing to ideologically charge the upcoming ballots, which are about relatively pragmatic proposals.
This is not for the sensitive mind. The best example is provided by the AHV debate: The Left argues that an increase in the retirement age for women would lead to a “reduction in pensions”. Compared to men, women would already suffer from a “pension gap”.
Well then. If women actually have lower earnings in old age, this is not due to the AHV, but to the pensions from the pension funds. These would just be higher if the retirement age rises and women pay longer. But the left doesn’t care.
Expansion of the “evening of life”
It is true that women in the AHV would lose some of their privileges. You would have to work the same amount of time as men to receive a full pension. The overdue equality would be implemented gently, with a transition phase of nine years, during which the AHV continues to pay the new pensioners exclusive, lifelong bonuses.
Left rhetoric is clumsy. Anyone who reinterprets the adjustment of the retirement age as a “reduction” would also have to take into account the great development in life expectancy since the AHV was founded in 1948. The “twilight years” now lasts almost a whole night: at that time, a 65-year-old woman could look forward to 14 remaining years – today there are 23. The increase for men is similarly impressive: from 12 to 20 years.
The secret expansion of the AHV
It is logical that the total sums of pensions drawn have also risen as a result. The regular adjustment to prices and wages has contributed to this. There is also an increase among women, even if you factor in the back and forth when it comes to their retirement age (from 65 to 62 to 64). However, it is not known that a left-wing spokesman was ever publicly happy about this ongoing expansion of the AHV.
In the coming months the SP and its comrades-in-arms will continue to do everything possible to make the urgent and painful question disappear in the smoke of the class struggle, which pension provision is really about and which Switzerland has been trying to answer for far too long: intergenerational equity in an aging society. It would be bitter if they could get away with it.