11 ms·

> If you gave europeans those 25% as an extra net pay, there would be a lot more new cars on the road, a bit more savings/investments, and a lot more problems w

by piva00 5y ago

> If you gave europeans those 25% as an extra net pay, there would be a lot more new cars on the road, a bit more savings/investments, and a lot more problems when people get old. "Smart" people would save and invest, and have better "pensions" than they'd have in the current system, and "stupid" people would work until 85yo, and die of hunger. Exactly, there is an ideology of pushing this kind of issue completely into "personal responsibility" territory which, for me, is frankly a total lack of empathy. The way it works here in Sweden seems pretty decent to me so far: you get a public pension that you and your employer have paid into the system (of course, it pays the current pensioners) and another part of my pension is put into a pension investment account, that I can operate/manage however I want. So you get both, a minimum pension sustained by the system paid by current working people and an investment account that I can manage and grow as a portfolio to use during my retirement.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
The problem (atleast in slovenia) is, that you don't get back the amount that you paid in. Eg. you work 40 years, and expect 20 years on pensions (made up numbers, just an example). If you get an average paycheck, pay 25% of it into the pension for 40 years, you expect to get approximately 50% of the average paycheck at the time of retirement. Well.. you don't (atleast not here). This also presumes, that there are 2x as many workers that pay into the fund, as there are retirees taking out of the fund... which sadly is not the case anymore, and the situation will get worse and worse. Also, due to many laws and changes, every few years, you get average-paid people retired in eg. 1991 that receive more than the average paycheck in retirement, and newly retired people getting 400eur of retirement (=not enough to survive).
- furyg3 5y ago
  I know nothing about Slovenia, but my hypothesis is that this is (kind of) by design. Those with good incomes subsidize those with low incomes, and everyone subsidizes those with no income. The only way to 'earn more' is through a positive return on investment, but pension schemes necessarily must err on the 'safe side'. And currently 'safe' interest rates are negative.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    > Those with good incomes subsidize those with low incomes, This keeps the average values the same (that's why I used the average example) > and everyone subsidizes those with no income. This seems to be an ongoing problem, where we on one side need workers, and on the other side pay unemployment benefits to people who don't want to work. This is then translated to pensions, where people who work only eg. 10 years (instead of 40) get a small pension, but still more than the share they paid into the fund.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I consider the subsidization of poor and no-income as the cheapest alternative. Pay them enough to live and the external cost won't be more. Theft, property damage, judicial system and incarceration get lot more expensive than just paying them something. And all the money going to them is anyway spend so on large scale it might not even be net negative.
- Mauricebranagh 5y ago
  A sate pension that pays 50% lol that's a big ask. I assume you have your employers pensions as well.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    We don't have separate pensions. You pay into the state (~25% of gross income, part is taken from your gross, part is paid by the employer, to get a 'gross-gross' value), and that's your pension. We have separate saving schemes for pension, where your income tax is deferred until you take the money out (due to progressive tax brackets, your tax percentage will be lower when you're retired, than it is now), but usually employers have nothing to do with that, and with interest lower than inflation, it's just not worth it.
- piva00 5y ago
  > The problem (atleast in slovenia) is, that you don't get back the amount that you paid in. Eg. you work 40 years, and expect 20 years on pensions (made up numbers, just an example). I don't know you but I never, ever, had the impression I'd get what I paid into any social security system. Neither here in Sweden or even less in Brazil. My salary is just too high compared to the median so I never had the thought that everything I paid into I'd get back as benefits. And to me, that's ok. I earn quite above the average, I don't mind that I can help fund some part of society with my work if this society is functional and well managed, so in Sweden I'm perfectly fine with this arrangement. In Brazil it was the complete opposite, even though I don't care about paying taxes, I do care about taxes always being stolen by a multitude of corrupt actors in Brazil.
  - saithound 5y ago
    You're talking about a different issue (or indeed a non-issue). It's not that high income Slovenians get a lot less out of Slovenian state pensions than they pay in. It's that _everybody_, including low income Slovenians gets a lot less out of it than they contributed. In fact, if Slovenia is anything like Romania, the percentages often work out a lot better for high income contributors.
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      ^yes, this. I chose the average on purpuse, to do just that. Poor people pay less, and are "subsidized" by the rich, who pay more, but an average person should get as much as they paid in. Considering that some people die young (before they retire), an average person should get even more than they paid into the system, because the heirs of the dead usually don't get the dead persons pension (with some exceptions, eg. underage kids)
      - ephbit 5y ago
        I guess there's another issue with this equation: avgOUT = avgIN + L The L(osses) ... the pension/social/levy system - no matter which country we're looking at - appears to have been hijacked by an ever growing parasitic group of financial institutions that milk whatever they can into their private pockets (and their shareholders'). Every penny in fees they receive for "working out" specialized retirement plans is in a way a L(oss) for society. Why? Because no matter what ingenious system a state devises, it all comes back to the fact that the current working/healthy part of the population has to provide for tho elderly and the sick and whoever can't provide for themselves. Every kind of juggling around with the money adding unnecessary steps in between is just milking the system for private gains.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  In Poland, by design, now people are paid on average >60% of paycheck while retiring at age 60-65, not taking into account some specific priviledges like for miners. Meanwhile, people in 20s-30s are projected to get 25% while retiring at close to 70. The system does not make any sense to me.
  - 2ion 5y ago
    It's the system that favors the voting majority.
ep103 5y ago
> Exactly, there is an ideology of pushing this kind of issue completely into "personal responsibility" territory which, for me, is frankly a total lack of empathy. The problem is you are misunderstanding American politics. The average well educated American understands that the European and Scandanavian models work better than the American system for all Americans. The misunderstanding is the idea that the average American WANTS a better life for ALL Americans. They do not. The median American wants a better life for the median American. And most educated Americans want better lives for all Americans. But a significant minority of the population wants a WORSE life for the black population. Full stop. Whenever you read a discussion on some controversial aspect of American politics, that appears to be worse for the population yet strangely controversial to fix, just ask yourself: does this policy disproportionately hurt black people? The people who are currently arguing for the status quo may no longer be racist, just profiteering. But this is the question to ask to determine why the system was put in place the way it was. Remember, if the policy disproportionately hurts poor people, that means it also disproportionately hurts black people. Attitudes are changing, and hopefully this won't be as large of an issue in the future. But it was only 40 years ago that the FBI's primary political directive was the disenfranchisement of African American organizations, and America's most recent president was a white supremacist. The current most popular TV news journalist in America right now, is Tucker Carlson, who is an active white supremacist. The current American system adopts enough welfare and social security that if you are white, statistically, social security + your career will probably be enough to ensure that you do not starve in retirement. And it promotes a lack of financial retirement savings such that if you are not white, and therefore statistically have a worse paying career in a more difficult financial environment, you are likely to have a troubled and difficult retirement. This is by design.
- concordDance 5y ago
  > The misunderstanding is the idea that the average American WANTS a better life for ALL Americans. They do not. Citation fucking needed.
  - ep103 5y ago
    Are... are you seriously asking me for a citation that racism has historically been a large and important driving force in American politics?
null_object 5y ago
> The way it works here in Sweden seems pretty decent to me so far: you get a public pension that you and your employer have paid into the system (of course, it pays the current pensioners) and another part of my pension is put into a pension investment account, that I can operate/manage however I want. > So you get both, a minimum pension sustained by the system paid by current working people and an investment account that I can manage and grow as a portfolio to use during my retirement. I think the word 'minimum' is going to have totally different implications for those of us working and saving now, compared to the previous generation, that are living on pretty generous pension plans that were wholly publicly-funded, and which our current payments are maintaining. Also the privatized pension plans in Sweden have been prey both to fraud and high fees. So even though they may give the illusion of future prosperity to those who are trying to save now, that's in no way a guarantee.
- jorvi 5y ago
  Yup. On a new defunct blog someone laid out in the comments that here in The Netherlands, if €300 of your wage went to pensions, sometjing like €200 would go to fund current pensioners and of that €200, €60 went to a very select group that got two very beneficial pension arrangements stacked.
  - thescriptkiddie 5y ago
    Technically all €300 of your contribution goes to fund current pensioners, regardless of how the pension is structured. The idea that you are setting aside money to pay for your own retirement is an illusion. Money is just a proxy for labor, and you cannot transport your own labor into the future to take care of yourself when you are too old to work. In reality, young people must always take care of the elderly, and population decline will be a problem regardless of how much the pension funds have saved up. The question of savings is actually a question of monetary policy: if the flow into the pension fund is greater than the flow out, this creates deflationary pressure (except in whatever assets the fund invests in) and vice versa.
    - kazen44 5y ago
jdasdf 5y ago
>Exactly, there is an ideology of pushing this kind of issue completely into "personal responsibility" territory which, for me, is frankly a total lack of empathy. It's not a lack of empathy, it's an understanding of the pernicious incentives you are creating with such a system. I'm being forced to pay over half of my income into a ponzi scheme that i am and will never get anything worthwhile out of. This isn't good for anyone, and it certainly isn't good for the people who are working and providing value and having that value thrown into a raging fire. This is nothing more than theft from the responsible to the irresponsible, with the associated long term issues. When you have support these policies you need to understand that they will not and cannot help the people you seek to help. All that happens is remove the need for people to be responsible and make good financial decisions, for the fact that "the state will save me". But of course, the state can't, because social security in most countries is no more than very large ponzi schemes, supported by ever growing tax revenues and increasingly high retirement ages. But even that is not enough, in Portugal retirement benefits are expected to fall by half in the next 20 years. And don't think these pernicious incentives don't exist and that peoples reliance on social security doesn't happen. That quote of "The state will save me" is almost word for word out of the mouth of friends and colleagues, with children and families, who despite being very well paid refuse to save and invest for their retirement, choosing instead to spend what they have today and only rely on social security for their retirement. These are terrible incentives, and they will and have had predictable results.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  > And don't think these pernicious incentives don't exist and that peoples reliance on social security doesn't happen. That quote of "The state will save me" is almost word for word out of the mouth of friends and colleagues, with children and families, who despite being very well paid refuse to save and invest for their retirement, choosing instead to spend what they have today and only rely on social security for their retirement. Tbh, in the current system (which is bad!), they are the "smart ones". You have Alice, Bob and Charlie. They all earn the same amount of money. Alice decides to take a loan and buy a 200k house. Bob stays at home and invests in stocks. Charlie stays at home, and puts the money in a savings account. 10 years go by, alice paid off 100k of the 200k loan, house is still worth 200k, bob has 100k of stocks and Charlie has 100k in the savings account (let's forget about the interest for this example). They are technically all worth the same, just that their money is in a different form. And then one day, they all lose their jobs. Alice gets social benefits, one time extra monetary help, loan refinancing and/or even a loan freeze in some cases, Bob gets nothing and is told to sell the stock (even if it's a bad moment to sell), and Charlie gets laughed at the social benefits office, because he has 100k in his account. This might be our (slovenian) speciality, but the system is made to fuck with people who live responsibly and to always 'save' the people who spend all their money. Also houses are almost literally untouchable, even if you're a single person in a ~1mio city center apartment, and could move to a smaller one a bit further from the center for 150k.
jimbokun 5y ago
> you get a public pension that you and your employer have paid into the system (of course, it pays the current pensioners) In the US we call that Social Security.

by piva00 5y ago

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

The problem (atleast in slovenia) is, that you don't get back the amount that you paid in. Eg. you work 40 years, and expect 20 years on pensions (made up numbers, just an example). If you get an average paycheck, pay 25% of it into the pension for 40 years, you expect to get approximately 50% of the average paycheck at the time of retirement. Well.. you don't (atleast not here). This also presumes, that there are 2x as many workers that pay into the fund, as there are retirees taking out of the fund... which sadly is not the case anymore, and the situation will get worse and worse. Also, due to many laws and changes, every few years, you get average-paid people retired in eg. 1991 that receive more than the average paycheck in retirement, and newly retired people getting 400eur of retirement (=not enough to survive).

furyg3 5y ago
I know nothing about Slovenia, but my hypothesis is that this is (kind of) by design. Those with good incomes subsidize those with low incomes, and everyone subsidizes those with no income. The only way to 'earn more' is through a positive return on investment, but pension schemes necessarily must err on the 'safe side'. And currently 'safe' interest rates are negative.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  > Those with good incomes subsidize those with low incomes, This keeps the average values the same (that's why I used the average example) > and everyone subsidizes those with no income. This seems to be an ongoing problem, where we on one side need workers, and on the other side pay unemployment benefits to people who don't want to work. This is then translated to pensions, where people who work only eg. 10 years (instead of 40) get a small pension, but still more than the share they paid into the fund.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I consider the subsidization of poor and no-income as the cheapest alternative. Pay them enough to live and the external cost won't be more. Theft, property damage, judicial system and incarceration get lot more expensive than just paying them something. And all the money going to them is anyway spend so on large scale it might not even be net negative.
Mauricebranagh 5y ago
A sate pension that pays 50% lol that's a big ask. I assume you have your employers pensions as well.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  We don't have separate pensions. You pay into the state (~25% of gross income, part is taken from your gross, part is paid by the employer, to get a 'gross-gross' value), and that's your pension. We have separate saving schemes for pension, where your income tax is deferred until you take the money out (due to progressive tax brackets, your tax percentage will be lower when you're retired, than it is now), but usually employers have nothing to do with that, and with interest lower than inflation, it's just not worth it.
piva00 5y ago
> The problem (atleast in slovenia) is, that you don't get back the amount that you paid in. Eg. you work 40 years, and expect 20 years on pensions (made up numbers, just an example). I don't know you but I never, ever, had the impression I'd get what I paid into any social security system. Neither here in Sweden or even less in Brazil. My salary is just too high compared to the median so I never had the thought that everything I paid into I'd get back as benefits. And to me, that's ok. I earn quite above the average, I don't mind that I can help fund some part of society with my work if this society is functional and well managed, so in Sweden I'm perfectly fine with this arrangement. In Brazil it was the complete opposite, even though I don't care about paying taxes, I do care about taxes always being stolen by a multitude of corrupt actors in Brazil.
- saithound 5y ago
  You're talking about a different issue (or indeed a non-issue). It's not that high income Slovenians get a lot less out of Slovenian state pensions than they pay in. It's that _everybody_, including low income Slovenians gets a lot less out of it than they contributed. In fact, if Slovenia is anything like Romania, the percentages often work out a lot better for high income contributors.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    ^yes, this. I chose the average on purpuse, to do just that. Poor people pay less, and are "subsidized" by the rich, who pay more, but an average person should get as much as they paid in. Considering that some people die young (before they retire), an average person should get even more than they paid into the system, because the heirs of the dead usually don't get the dead persons pension (with some exceptions, eg. underage kids)
    - ephbit 5y ago
      I guess there's another issue with this equation: avgOUT = avgIN + L The L(osses) ... the pension/social/levy system - no matter which country we're looking at - appears to have been hijacked by an ever growing parasitic group of financial institutions that milk whatever they can into their private pockets (and their shareholders'). Every penny in fees they receive for "working out" specialized retirement plans is in a way a L(oss) for society. Why? Because no matter what ingenious system a state devises, it all comes back to the fact that the current working/healthy part of the population has to provide for tho elderly and the sick and whoever can't provide for themselves. Every kind of juggling around with the money adding unnecessary steps in between is just milking the system for private gains.
KptMarchewa 5y ago
In Poland, by design, now people are paid on average >60% of paycheck while retiring at age 60-65, not taking into account some specific priviledges like for miners. Meanwhile, people in 20s-30s are projected to get 25% while retiring at close to 70. The system does not make any sense to me.
- 2ion 5y ago
  It's the system that favors the voting majority.

ep103 5y ago

> Exactly, there is an ideology of pushing this kind of issue completely into "personal responsibility" territory which, for me, is frankly a total lack of empathy. The problem is you are misunderstanding American politics. The average well educated American understands that the European and Scandanavian models work better than the American system for all Americans. The misunderstanding is the idea that the average American WANTS a better life for ALL Americans. They do not. The median American wants a better life for the median American. And most educated Americans want better lives for all Americans. But a significant minority of the population wants a WORSE life for the black population. Full stop. Whenever you read a discussion on some controversial aspect of American politics, that appears to be worse for the population yet strangely controversial to fix, just ask yourself: does this policy disproportionately hurt black people? The people who are currently arguing for the status quo may no longer be racist, just profiteering. But this is the question to ask to determine why the system was put in place the way it was. Remember, if the policy disproportionately hurts poor people, that means it also disproportionately hurts black people. Attitudes are changing, and hopefully this won't be as large of an issue in the future. But it was only 40 years ago that the FBI's primary political directive was the disenfranchisement of African American organizations, and America's most recent president was a white supremacist. The current most popular TV news journalist in America right now, is Tucker Carlson, who is an active white supremacist. The current American system adopts enough welfare and social security that if you are white, statistically, social security + your career will probably be enough to ensure that you do not starve in retirement. And it promotes a lack of financial retirement savings such that if you are not white, and therefore statistically have a worse paying career in a more difficult financial environment, you are likely to have a troubled and difficult retirement. This is by design.

concordDance 5y ago
> The misunderstanding is the idea that the average American WANTS a better life for ALL Americans. They do not. Citation fucking needed.
- ep103 5y ago
  Are... are you seriously asking me for a citation that racism has historically been a large and important driving force in American politics?

null_object 5y ago

> The way it works here in Sweden seems pretty decent to me so far: you get a public pension that you and your employer have paid into the system (of course, it pays the current pensioners) and another part of my pension is put into a pension investment account, that I can operate/manage however I want. > So you get both, a minimum pension sustained by the system paid by current working people and an investment account that I can manage and grow as a portfolio to use during my retirement. I think the word 'minimum' is going to have totally different implications for those of us working and saving now, compared to the previous generation, that are living on pretty generous pension plans that were wholly publicly-funded, and which our current payments are maintaining. Also the privatized pension plans in Sweden have been prey both to fraud and high fees. So even though they may give the illusion of future prosperity to those who are trying to save now, that's in no way a guarantee.

jorvi 5y ago
Yup. On a new defunct blog someone laid out in the comments that here in The Netherlands, if €300 of your wage went to pensions, sometjing like €200 would go to fund current pensioners and of that €200, €60 went to a very select group that got two very beneficial pension arrangements stacked.
- thescriptkiddie 5y ago
  Technically all €300 of your contribution goes to fund current pensioners, regardless of how the pension is structured. The idea that you are setting aside money to pay for your own retirement is an illusion. Money is just a proxy for labor, and you cannot transport your own labor into the future to take care of yourself when you are too old to work. In reality, young people must always take care of the elderly, and population decline will be a problem regardless of how much the pension funds have saved up. The question of savings is actually a question of monetary policy: if the flow into the pension fund is greater than the flow out, this creates deflationary pressure (except in whatever assets the fund invests in) and vice versa.
  - kazen44 5y ago

jdasdf 5y ago

>Exactly, there is an ideology of pushing this kind of issue completely into "personal responsibility" territory which, for me, is frankly a total lack of empathy. It's not a lack of empathy, it's an understanding of the pernicious incentives you are creating with such a system. I'm being forced to pay over half of my income into a ponzi scheme that i am and will never get anything worthwhile out of. This isn't good for anyone, and it certainly isn't good for the people who are working and providing value and having that value thrown into a raging fire. This is nothing more than theft from the responsible to the irresponsible, with the associated long term issues. When you have support these policies you need to understand that they will not and cannot help the people you seek to help. All that happens is remove the need for people to be responsible and make good financial decisions, for the fact that "the state will save me". But of course, the state can't, because social security in most countries is no more than very large ponzi schemes, supported by ever growing tax revenues and increasingly high retirement ages. But even that is not enough, in Portugal retirement benefits are expected to fall by half in the next 20 years. And don't think these pernicious incentives don't exist and that peoples reliance on social security doesn't happen. That quote of "The state will save me" is almost word for word out of the mouth of friends and colleagues, with children and families, who despite being very well paid refuse to save and invest for their retirement, choosing instead to spend what they have today and only rely on social security for their retirement. These are terrible incentives, and they will and have had predictable results.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
> And don't think these pernicious incentives don't exist and that peoples reliance on social security doesn't happen. That quote of "The state will save me" is almost word for word out of the mouth of friends and colleagues, with children and families, who despite being very well paid refuse to save and invest for their retirement, choosing instead to spend what they have today and only rely on social security for their retirement. Tbh, in the current system (which is bad!), they are the "smart ones". You have Alice, Bob and Charlie. They all earn the same amount of money. Alice decides to take a loan and buy a 200k house. Bob stays at home and invests in stocks. Charlie stays at home, and puts the money in a savings account. 10 years go by, alice paid off 100k of the 200k loan, house is still worth 200k, bob has 100k of stocks and Charlie has 100k in the savings account (let's forget about the interest for this example). They are technically all worth the same, just that their money is in a different form. And then one day, they all lose their jobs. Alice gets social benefits, one time extra monetary help, loan refinancing and/or even a loan freeze in some cases, Bob gets nothing and is told to sell the stock (even if it's a bad moment to sell), and Charlie gets laughed at the social benefits office, because he has 100k in his account. This might be our (slovenian) speciality, but the system is made to fuck with people who live responsibly and to always 'save' the people who spend all their money. Also houses are almost literally untouchable, even if you're a single person in a ~1mio city center apartment, and could move to a smaller one a bit further from the center for 150k.

jimbokun 5y ago

> you get a public pension that you and your employer have paid into the system (of course, it pays the current pensioners) In the US we call that Social Security.