It concerns the welfare system that has grown too big to be sustained by income taxes. Or, to put it another way, the income taxes have become too low to suppo

It concerns the welfare system that has grown too big to be sustained by income taxes. Or, to put it another way, the income taxes have become too low to support the welfare system. To be honest, the amount of spurious framing in these debates is annoying me. Of course the welfare system is sustainable. The only question is whether there is a will to sustain it. One way to look at it (which, admittedly, may be a form of framing as well): Do we want to live in a perhaps demanding but still caring society, where you can focus on achieving great things, or do we want to live in an uncaring society, where the majority is forced to focus on maintaining what little they have. Fear of losing status or real standards of living is a great productivity killer, because fear generally switches our brains into a narrow-minded tunnel vision mode. That mode may be useful when you're chased by wolves in the forest, but it's not such a great thing for being productive in a complex economic environment. What is driving now the crisis are public expenses, don't fool around with other fantasies. There are always two sides of the coin. Where you see high expenses, I see low income. It is also important to note that public welfare systems tend to be more efficient than private ones. In the case of Germany, for example, the overhead of private pension funds is often around or above 4%, where the overhead of the public pension system is below 1%. So for the same amount of pensions provided, the private system is more expensive and less efficient than the public system.