>Rather than let the system fail gradually or seek to reform it in general, politicians took the easy way out and started supplemanting it from the general budg

>Rather than let the system fail gradually or seek to reform it in general, politicians took the easy way out and started supplemanting it from the general budget and have been ever since. I don’t blame the politicians, as it is impossible to get elected on a platform of reducing the biggest voting bloc’s (perceived) quality of life. It’s just a structural weakness in democracy due to the way humans are, papered over by growth due to high fertility rates in previous generations and the resulting momentum that I think started petering out somewhere in the 1990s.