Only the younger generation should secure their pensions for the coming decades and bear the burden. This is not only unfair, it is also stupid.
If this were a football game, the result would be 3-0. The younger team conceded three goals, the older team conceded none, and there won’t be a second leg for more than a decade. Only: It wasn’t a football game that the federal government called off, it was one of the biggest social reforms of the past decades – and one of the biggest raids between generations of all. It’s a miracle that the barricades aren’t burning in Berlin.
In order to keep statutory pensions at the desired level well into the next decade, the federal government is exempting the young in the name of the old until there is nothing left. With “Pension Package 2”, as the labor and finance ministers called it, trivializing the blatant injustice, the young people pay three times. The older ones not once. They should vote for the government parties, first and foremost the SPD.
In order for the ratio between a certain average pension and a certain average wage to remain the same year after year (48 percent), employees’ pension contributions will increase significantly – by around a fifth. This is deducted directly from your salary before it is in the account. By the way, the employers also pay for this, which is why they are now up in arms. Your association president calls the package “the most expensive social law of this century.” He is absolutely right.
In addition, it is almost exclusively the younger generation who use their taxes to finance the subsidy that flows from the federal budget year after year so that the statutory pension can even make ends meet. Most recently it was a good 110 billion euros, almost one in four euros from the federal budget. Over the years, the various federal governments have decided on new special benefits for the elderly. You can somehow find each one of them good, but no one can actually pay for them all together. This subsidy is expected to increase by 30 to 60 billion euros (depending on the calculation) – per year. The boys have it.
The pension fund needs more money because the number of pensioners is increasing, they are living longer, and at the same time the number of younger people, those paying contributions, is shrinking. German society is getting older and older. The government would have to distribute the costs and burdens that this poses fairly fairly across all generations. But she doesn’t, and the otherwise oh-so-critical opposition from the CDU to the AfD also keeps its mouth shut. They say you shouldn’t mess with pensioners. Nobody has seriously tried it yet. All cowards.
There was even a small, complicated mechanism that would have allocated at least a smaller portion of the aging burden to the current generation of retirees. Accordingly, the average pension in question would have increased slightly less in percentage terms than the average wage in the next few years: the working children would have had a little more breathing room, and their pensioner parents would hardly have noticed. But the SPD, Greens and FDP didn’t have enough courage even for this little bit: the compensation mechanism was slandered as a “pension cut”. This is intended to scare millions of people, but it is proven to be a lie.
Politics will not change on its own. It’s time for parents to wake up. It’s time they let governments and parties know that their own children should not be made poor just because they are young. The statutory pension holds society together because it allows the vast majority of older people to sleep peacefully. However, what the traffic light does with pensions is the opposite. It opens up the gap between young and old.