7 ms·

There is nothing sad about this. Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselv

There is nothing sad about this. Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves. If you were born in the 70s, you should have known for most of your adult life that your normal retirement age is likely going to be around 70. The demographic situation is not new, the solutions have been discussed extensively since at least the 90s, and countries that take the situation seriously have implemented several pension reforms since then. You are not going to be as wealthy in retirement as you are now, at least not on the mandatory pension alone. Your health is probably not going to be as good. If you live in Sweden, you should have plenty of vacation. If you think you would enjoy travel, golf, or climbing a mountain, you should do it now. It will probably be easier and more affordable now than in retirement, which may never come.

interstice 1y ago
I guess this comes down to whether you view what you get back for devoting most of a life to work as a negotiated agreement with government or as a one way street.
- KPGv2 1y ago
  Isn't democracy the negotiation part?
  - IG_Semmelweiss 1y ago
    Yes. Those that came before you negotiated on their own behalf, how badly to loot your future. Now you must do the same..
- jltsiren 1y ago
  "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." That socialist principle has always been the essence of the Nordic model. While the Nordic countries chose regulated markets over actual socialism, they embraced that part of socialism. As a citizen, your moral duty is to contribute when you can. If too many people fail to do that, the system falls apart. In exchange, the government evens the burden between different stages of life and between people in different situations. You live your life now, the government takes what it needs, and it provides for you when your needs exceed your ability. Also, as small democratic countries with limited ambitions outside their borders, the Nordic system of governance is supposed to be more "by the people, for the people" than it has ever been in the US. You don't negotiate agreements with the government, but you take responsibility for making things work. If too many citizens fail to do that, the system falls apart.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    > Nordic model I see this term used frequently in Anglo-American media. I don't get it. What is special or different about the "Nordic" model compared to France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Austria? Their regulations, tax rates, and social benefits are nearly identical. > with limited ambitions outside their borders I don't understand this phrase. Can you explain more? Some examples and counter-examples would help. Also, I don't buy the argument that "small democratic countries" are so different than larger ones. I hear this argument a lot from both sides (big and small). One difference that I do see is how they choose to use their military power, but that applies to non-democratic state also. Ultimately, the goal of a democratic state is to (1) get rich and (2) treat your citizens well (free speech, along with decent education, public safety, healthcare, and retirement).
    - Jensson 1y ago
      > I see this term used frequently in Anglo-American media. I don't get it. What is special or different about the "Nordic" model compared to France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Austria? Their regulations, tax rates, and social benefits are nearly identical. The big difference is the culture around it all, in Scandinavia these things works with low corruption and high freedom and transparency while the more southern parts are much more corrupt and authoritarian. So that results in Scandinavian countries topping so many charts while France, Austria, Germany etc do not. So the difference is not what they do but how deeply rooted that is in their culture. Scandinavian countries started this, the others just copied Scandinavia.
      - ahartmetz 1y ago
        Germany was first. Bismarck did it to preempt the socialists. https://www.ssa.gov/history/ottob.html https://www.ssa.gov/history/ottob.html By the way, the retirement age of 65 was chosen at the time based on "when the average worker dies", a long retirement had never been the plan. We are now getting back to that.
        1y ago
timewizard 1y ago
> Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves. Then why is it based on earnings? And why can't I opt out of this death pledge? > Your health is probably not going to be as good Ah, the old, "your life will suck anyways" play. > you should have known for most of your adult life That you are a slave to the state, until you cannot work anymore, and then you will be discarded brutally. Hard to figure out why the younger generation doesn't want to buy into this.
- nradov 1y ago
  Does the younger generation have a choice about buying into this? I don't think they have another option. They can emigrate but all of the other countries with a decent quality of life are facing similar demographic problems.
  - moktonar 1y ago
    Only future will tell right?
DanHulton 1y ago
Taxes pay these pensions. Taxes that citizens have paid for their whole working lives, with the understanding that they would benefit from that pension fund in their later years. It's actually far closer to a "vacation", but not "sponsored by the government" -- closer to "that you've been saving for already for years."
- m-schuetz 1y ago
  You save for a state pension the same way you save for state health care - not at all. The current working people pay for the current retired people, and this only works so long as there are significantly more working than retired people. Advantage of this system: You dont need to be afraid of not having saved enough money if you end up living too long. Disadtvantage: Thid only works if there are substantially more working people than retired people, which is no longer the case, so pensions have to be reduced.
  - Varqu 1y ago
    Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension. Currently, it's the worst of both worlds: you get taxed quite a significant portion of your income, and then, in the middle of the game, someone changes the rules and tells you to play longer in order to get the prize.
    - m-schuetz 1y ago
      I agree that it should be kept to a minimum and that luxurious pensions at the cost of working people should not exist.
    - alexey-salmin 1y ago
      > Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension. This doesn't fundamentally change the equation. Whether you save pension points or cash or ETFs it's just a coupon for your share of the economy of the future. It's a promise that the future generation will share some of their income with you.
mchanson 1y ago
Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive? Improved health so we can all work more is kinda stupid.
- adastra22 1y ago
  > Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. Why? When was that the deal? I’m genuinely confused.
- jltsiren 1y ago
  That's been happening, but not as quickly as earlier generations expected. In 1970, the average labor force participant (employed or unemployed) in Denmark worked 1845 hours. By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries but not for East Europe or the US.
  - vitus 1y ago
    > 1371 hours Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Shorter workweek, fewer hours per day, drastically more vacation, or some combination of the above? Based on a 40-hour workweek, this would be 34 workweeks. Adding on 2-3 weeks worth of paid holidays, that leaves the equivalent of 15-16 weeks of vacation a year? I know my coworkers in Europe get more vacation than we do, but somehow I don't think it's that much more. With a 32-hour workweek, this instead looks like ~6 weeks of vacation, which is more believable.
    - simongray 1y ago
      Full-time in Denmark is 37 hours/week and most people have around 6 weeks of vacation/year (the legal minimum is 5). Some people will be working part-time, bringing the total hours worked down, so the numbers make sense to me.
      - AStonesThrow 1y ago
        In the United States, full-time hours are in a range. Part-time workers are often capped at 29 hours per week, due to tax considerations, such as the Affordable Care Act and other benefits. 30 hours is where the "full-time" label is applied there. A wage-earning (non-exempt) worker must be paid overtime when they exceed full-time, which is typically a 40-hour maximum. Overtime pay may be "time and a half" or "double time" in certain circumstances. Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. Sometimes we refer to "banker's hours" which has the negative connotation that the worker never ever works outside that schedule.
wsatb 1y ago
You said there’s nothing sad about it and then followed it up with some pretty sad realities. It’s incredibly sad. People should be working less as we advance as a society, not more.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- charcircuit 1y ago
  Working means that you are providing value to others. As we advance as a society a single person is able to contribute more and more value to others. Why maintain the same amount of total value being added to society when we can push further and accelerate providing value to one another?
  - pillefitz 1y ago
    By value you mean furthering the individualization and alienation by technology, which destroys the planet and gives us what, AI data centers? And the AI agents won't even do our jobs?
    - CooCooCaCha 1y ago
      I'm convinced there are a large number of people, mostly in tech, that are unknowingly in a death cult because they think complex human systems can be boiled down to simple metrics and logic. And they get attached to this libertarian-type thinking because it makes them feel smart and above it all. Like the rest of us are over-complicating it, and human economic prosperity is as simple as blindly accelerating value creation.
  - imtringued 1y ago
    Working just means that you get paid to do something. What you're rambling on about is some Ayn Randian technicality that has nothing to do with reality. The word "value" here means "non-measurable quantity in the neoclassical paradigm, approximated by indirect measure through unit of account", not anything meaningful. A childcare worker raising children is "value". A mother raising her child is not "value". In other words, you're just measuring how much human activity conforms to a specific formalization.
monkeycantype 1y ago
pensions can be whatever we decide as a society agree they should be. Your perspective is an opinion, and many people share it, it has been a dominant view for decades, but it has never been a universal view.
- flembat 1y ago
  There is a solution for young people they should look at this demographic disaster and realise they need to have children for the sake of their own future. Meanwhile the next generation or two to retire is going to have a very grim time surviving because we had two kids or none, compared to the five our parents had.
  - roarcher 1y ago
    And those children will have to have even more children, and so on. The system is designed to work as long as it can grow forever, which it obviously cannot. Some generation is going to have to reckon with the demographic problem.
    - dgfitz 1y ago
      Yeah, China.
      - roarcher 1y ago
        China isn't a generation.
  - seec 1y ago
    When half of your work output is taken away to give to your already well-off parents, you don't have much left over to have kids.
moktonar 1y ago
If pensions where not mandatory you would be almost right. But pensions are mandatory, the state will invest the money upfront and earn from those investments. It's just a way of making you pay more, and then give you back less. Another hidden tax to pay whatever operation their incommensurate ego want to pursue.
- soco 1y ago
  Allow me to remind you that Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others". Or in this situation, pensions are the worst form of retirement savings, except for all the others. Political parties struggle even imagining alternative solutions, but if you found a better idea by all means please come forward and we will all vote for you! I will for sure.
  - moktonar 1y ago
    Non-mandatory, private savings is a far better idea. Ah wait but now the govt doesn't have the money anymore... ops. Maybe _that's_ why they struggle, because they don't find a way of taking your money without telling you... we changed forms of government, but taxes (and hidden taxes) remain, did you notice?
    - soco 1y ago
      I honestly didn't notice. I know exactly what my taxes are and where they go, and I can even vote to direct them this or that way. I highly recommend such an approach.
    - throw0101d 1y ago
      > Non-mandatory, private savings is a far better idea. As someone who reads personal finance sub-reddits I completely disagree. The vast majority of people (a) do not have the long-term thinking for long-term needs, and/or (b) have money go by them without noticing they haven't saved anything. There's a reason why "Pay yourself first." is a mantra that has to be hammered into people through education (e.g., The Wealth Barber); most folks don't get that education or don't take it to heart. > Ah wait but now the govt doesn't have the money anymore... ops. In Canada the government does not have access to the money of our public pension, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP ~ US Social Security).
js8 1y ago
"Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government" Who are you talking for? I think plenty of people would prefer it to be that. We should respect our elderly, as a society.
- sieabahlpark 1y ago
  [dead]
zilian 1y ago
This is such a sad comment. Indeed, the demographic situation was known and predictable in the 80's, and for instance in France we did nothing to plan around it. So now the young generation is expected to pay longer and longer for retirees, who have a higher median revenue and a higher standard of life than the active workforce (per all studies). There is absolutely no way I'm working until 70 to finance errors from the past without a contribution from our current retirees' wealth. There is anyway no foreseeable future with work for everyone until 70 with our current technological progress unless you want to slave everyone in bullshit jobs. All of this is madness.
- mcv 1y ago
  This was exactly my complaint when the Dutch retirement age was raised from 65 to 67. Baby boomers, the largest generation, were about to retire, and the argument was that the younger generations weren't large enough to provide for them, so they'd have to continue working longer. But it wasn't the baby boomers who had to work longer, it was the younger generations who had to work longer for the baby boomers to be able to retire. At the very least tax the generous pensions of the wealthier baby boomers to provide for the poorer baby boomers.
- seec 1y ago
  You can't say they did nothing about it. They actually did: make sure to restrain access to well-paying jobs with long and costly studies; make sure to regulate any way the young could get ahead by creating rules for things they never had to suffer through and make sure to increase the age of retirement as well as increase the ratio of contributions from salary. It's all very cynical, and it's based on fundamental egoistic human behavior. Most boomers I know are proud to be egoist and very often stingy. They all think that they can make the difference by helping their own children, but this is flawed "thinking" in a system that is profoundly collectivist. And all this comes from the massive flaw of democracy: only numbers matter, if you are the dominant demographic, you can get whatever you want, regardless of the nefarious impacts down the line. When people keep repeating the trope of democracy is the worst form of government expect of all the others, I laugh my ass off. It can only be so if you have a way to weigh the votes otherwise you are just ruled by the tyranny of the mob and that generally doesn't turn out nicely. The problem has been artificially created, the ideology said that restricting personal freedom was better for everyone as a whole and we can very much observe that this was a lie of epic proportions...
mcv 1y ago
But what is the point of all of increases in productivity if not to let us enjoy life more? Longer life expectancy should be more than offset by the increases in productivity.
lm28469 1y ago
> pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves. If you had the chance to find a nice job that paid well and played your cards right it definitely is, why do we need to pay high pensions to people who own multiple properties, have millions on the side and could EASILY thrive just from their passive income ?
hoppp 1y ago
"which may never come" But you pay for it all your life, so it's unfair. It would be better to manage your own retirement funds, invest it and retire when you want, free from the government.

interstice 1y ago

I guess this comes down to whether you view what you get back for devoting most of a life to work as a negotiated agreement with government or as a one way street.

KPGv2 1y ago
Isn't democracy the negotiation part?
- IG_Semmelweiss 1y ago
  Yes. Those that came before you negotiated on their own behalf, how badly to loot your future. Now you must do the same..
jltsiren 1y ago
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." That socialist principle has always been the essence of the Nordic model. While the Nordic countries chose regulated markets over actual socialism, they embraced that part of socialism. As a citizen, your moral duty is to contribute when you can. If too many people fail to do that, the system falls apart. In exchange, the government evens the burden between different stages of life and between people in different situations. You live your life now, the government takes what it needs, and it provides for you when your needs exceed your ability. Also, as small democratic countries with limited ambitions outside their borders, the Nordic system of governance is supposed to be more "by the people, for the people" than it has ever been in the US. You don't negotiate agreements with the government, but you take responsibility for making things work. If too many citizens fail to do that, the system falls apart.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  > Nordic model I see this term used frequently in Anglo-American media. I don't get it. What is special or different about the "Nordic" model compared to France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Austria? Their regulations, tax rates, and social benefits are nearly identical. > with limited ambitions outside their borders I don't understand this phrase. Can you explain more? Some examples and counter-examples would help. Also, I don't buy the argument that "small democratic countries" are so different than larger ones. I hear this argument a lot from both sides (big and small). One difference that I do see is how they choose to use their military power, but that applies to non-democratic state also. Ultimately, the goal of a democratic state is to (1) get rich and (2) treat your citizens well (free speech, along with decent education, public safety, healthcare, and retirement).
  - Jensson 1y ago
    > I see this term used frequently in Anglo-American media. I don't get it. What is special or different about the "Nordic" model compared to France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Austria? Their regulations, tax rates, and social benefits are nearly identical. The big difference is the culture around it all, in Scandinavia these things works with low corruption and high freedom and transparency while the more southern parts are much more corrupt and authoritarian. So that results in Scandinavian countries topping so many charts while France, Austria, Germany etc do not. So the difference is not what they do but how deeply rooted that is in their culture. Scandinavian countries started this, the others just copied Scandinavia.
    - ahartmetz 1y ago
      Germany was first. Bismarck did it to preempt the socialists. https://www.ssa.gov/history/ottob.html https://www.ssa.gov/history/ottob.html By the way, the retirement age of 65 was chosen at the time based on "when the average worker dies", a long retirement had never been the plan. We are now getting back to that.
      - 1y ago

timewizard 1y ago

> Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves. Then why is it based on earnings? And why can't I opt out of this death pledge? > Your health is probably not going to be as good Ah, the old, "your life will suck anyways" play. > you should have known for most of your adult life That you are a slave to the state, until you cannot work anymore, and then you will be discarded brutally. Hard to figure out why the younger generation doesn't want to buy into this.

nradov 1y ago
Does the younger generation have a choice about buying into this? I don't think they have another option. They can emigrate but all of the other countries with a decent quality of life are facing similar demographic problems.
- moktonar 1y ago
  Only future will tell right?

DanHulton 1y ago

Taxes pay these pensions. Taxes that citizens have paid for their whole working lives, with the understanding that they would benefit from that pension fund in their later years. It's actually far closer to a "vacation", but not "sponsored by the government" -- closer to "that you've been saving for already for years."

m-schuetz 1y ago
You save for a state pension the same way you save for state health care - not at all. The current working people pay for the current retired people, and this only works so long as there are significantly more working than retired people. Advantage of this system: You dont need to be afraid of not having saved enough money if you end up living too long. Disadtvantage: Thid only works if there are substantially more working people than retired people, which is no longer the case, so pensions have to be reduced.
- Varqu 1y ago
  Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension. Currently, it's the worst of both worlds: you get taxed quite a significant portion of your income, and then, in the middle of the game, someone changes the rules and tells you to play longer in order to get the prize.
  - m-schuetz 1y ago
    I agree that it should be kept to a minimum and that luxurious pensions at the cost of working people should not exist.
  - alexey-salmin 1y ago
    > Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension. This doesn't fundamentally change the equation. Whether you save pension points or cash or ETFs it's just a coupon for your share of the economy of the future. It's a promise that the future generation will share some of their income with you.

mchanson 1y ago

Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive? Improved health so we can all work more is kinda stupid.

adastra22 1y ago
> Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. Why? When was that the deal? I’m genuinely confused.
jltsiren 1y ago
That's been happening, but not as quickly as earlier generations expected. In 1970, the average labor force participant (employed or unemployed) in Denmark worked 1845 hours. By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries but not for East Europe or the US.
- vitus 1y ago
  > 1371 hours Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Shorter workweek, fewer hours per day, drastically more vacation, or some combination of the above? Based on a 40-hour workweek, this would be 34 workweeks. Adding on 2-3 weeks worth of paid holidays, that leaves the equivalent of 15-16 weeks of vacation a year? I know my coworkers in Europe get more vacation than we do, but somehow I don't think it's that much more. With a 32-hour workweek, this instead looks like ~6 weeks of vacation, which is more believable.
  - simongray 1y ago
    Full-time in Denmark is 37 hours/week and most people have around 6 weeks of vacation/year (the legal minimum is 5). Some people will be working part-time, bringing the total hours worked down, so the numbers make sense to me.
    - AStonesThrow 1y ago
      In the United States, full-time hours are in a range. Part-time workers are often capped at 29 hours per week, due to tax considerations, such as the Affordable Care Act and other benefits. 30 hours is where the "full-time" label is applied there. A wage-earning (non-exempt) worker must be paid overtime when they exceed full-time, which is typically a 40-hour maximum. Overtime pay may be "time and a half" or "double time" in certain circumstances. Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. Sometimes we refer to "banker's hours" which has the negative connotation that the worker never ever works outside that schedule.

wsatb 1y ago

You said there’s nothing sad about it and then followed it up with some pretty sad realities. It’s incredibly sad. People should be working less as we advance as a society, not more.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
charcircuit 1y ago
Working means that you are providing value to others. As we advance as a society a single person is able to contribute more and more value to others. Why maintain the same amount of total value being added to society when we can push further and accelerate providing value to one another?
- pillefitz 1y ago
  By value you mean furthering the individualization and alienation by technology, which destroys the planet and gives us what, AI data centers? And the AI agents won't even do our jobs?
  - CooCooCaCha 1y ago
    I'm convinced there are a large number of people, mostly in tech, that are unknowingly in a death cult because they think complex human systems can be boiled down to simple metrics and logic. And they get attached to this libertarian-type thinking because it makes them feel smart and above it all. Like the rest of us are over-complicating it, and human economic prosperity is as simple as blindly accelerating value creation.
- imtringued 1y ago
  Working just means that you get paid to do something. What you're rambling on about is some Ayn Randian technicality that has nothing to do with reality. The word "value" here means "non-measurable quantity in the neoclassical paradigm, approximated by indirect measure through unit of account", not anything meaningful. A childcare worker raising children is "value". A mother raising her child is not "value". In other words, you're just measuring how much human activity conforms to a specific formalization.

monkeycantype 1y ago

pensions can be whatever we decide as a society agree they should be. Your perspective is an opinion, and many people share it, it has been a dominant view for decades, but it has never been a universal view.

flembat 1y ago
There is a solution for young people they should look at this demographic disaster and realise they need to have children for the sake of their own future. Meanwhile the next generation or two to retire is going to have a very grim time surviving because we had two kids or none, compared to the five our parents had.
- roarcher 1y ago
  And those children will have to have even more children, and so on. The system is designed to work as long as it can grow forever, which it obviously cannot. Some generation is going to have to reckon with the demographic problem.
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    Yeah, China.
    - roarcher 1y ago
      China isn't a generation.
- seec 1y ago
  When half of your work output is taken away to give to your already well-off parents, you don't have much left over to have kids.

moktonar 1y ago

If pensions where not mandatory you would be almost right. But pensions are mandatory, the state will invest the money upfront and earn from those investments. It's just a way of making you pay more, and then give you back less. Another hidden tax to pay whatever operation their incommensurate ego want to pursue.

soco 1y ago
Allow me to remind you that Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others". Or in this situation, pensions are the worst form of retirement savings, except for all the others. Political parties struggle even imagining alternative solutions, but if you found a better idea by all means please come forward and we will all vote for you! I will for sure.
- moktonar 1y ago
  Non-mandatory, private savings is a far better idea. Ah wait but now the govt doesn't have the money anymore... ops. Maybe _that's_ why they struggle, because they don't find a way of taking your money without telling you... we changed forms of government, but taxes (and hidden taxes) remain, did you notice?
  - soco 1y ago
    I honestly didn't notice. I know exactly what my taxes are and where they go, and I can even vote to direct them this or that way. I highly recommend such an approach.
  - throw0101d 1y ago
    > Non-mandatory, private savings is a far better idea. As someone who reads personal finance sub-reddits I completely disagree. The vast majority of people (a) do not have the long-term thinking for long-term needs, and/or (b) have money go by them without noticing they haven't saved anything. There's a reason why "Pay yourself first." is a mantra that has to be hammered into people through education (e.g., The Wealth Barber); most folks don't get that education or don't take it to heart. > Ah wait but now the govt doesn't have the money anymore... ops. In Canada the government does not have access to the money of our public pension, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP ~ US Social Security).

js8 1y ago

"Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government" Who are you talking for? I think plenty of people would prefer it to be that. We should respect our elderly, as a society.

sieabahlpark 1y ago
[dead]

zilian 1y ago

This is such a sad comment. Indeed, the demographic situation was known and predictable in the 80's, and for instance in France we did nothing to plan around it. So now the young generation is expected to pay longer and longer for retirees, who have a higher median revenue and a higher standard of life than the active workforce (per all studies). There is absolutely no way I'm working until 70 to finance errors from the past without a contribution from our current retirees' wealth. There is anyway no foreseeable future with work for everyone until 70 with our current technological progress unless you want to slave everyone in bullshit jobs. All of this is madness.

mcv 1y ago
This was exactly my complaint when the Dutch retirement age was raised from 65 to 67. Baby boomers, the largest generation, were about to retire, and the argument was that the younger generations weren't large enough to provide for them, so they'd have to continue working longer. But it wasn't the baby boomers who had to work longer, it was the younger generations who had to work longer for the baby boomers to be able to retire. At the very least tax the generous pensions of the wealthier baby boomers to provide for the poorer baby boomers.
seec 1y ago
You can't say they did nothing about it. They actually did: make sure to restrain access to well-paying jobs with long and costly studies; make sure to regulate any way the young could get ahead by creating rules for things they never had to suffer through and make sure to increase the age of retirement as well as increase the ratio of contributions from salary. It's all very cynical, and it's based on fundamental egoistic human behavior. Most boomers I know are proud to be egoist and very often stingy. They all think that they can make the difference by helping their own children, but this is flawed "thinking" in a system that is profoundly collectivist. And all this comes from the massive flaw of democracy: only numbers matter, if you are the dominant demographic, you can get whatever you want, regardless of the nefarious impacts down the line. When people keep repeating the trope of democracy is the worst form of government expect of all the others, I laugh my ass off. It can only be so if you have a way to weigh the votes otherwise you are just ruled by the tyranny of the mob and that generally doesn't turn out nicely. The problem has been artificially created, the ideology said that restricting personal freedom was better for everyone as a whole and we can very much observe that this was a lie of epic proportions...

mcv 1y ago

But what is the point of all of increases in productivity if not to let us enjoy life more? Longer life expectancy should be more than offset by the increases in productivity.

lm28469 1y ago

> pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves. If you had the chance to find a nice job that paid well and played your cards right it definitely is, why do we need to pay high pensions to people who own multiple properties, have millions on the side and could EASILY thrive just from their passive income ?

hoppp 1y ago

"which may never come" But you pay for it all your life, so it's unfair. It would be better to manage your own retirement funds, invest it and retire when you want, free from the government.