German workers are more productive than ever, but how dare we think producing 2% more GDP means Healthcare costs can increase 2%? That increase belongs to CEOs, banks and shareholders! And don’t even try to balance it out by re-instating the wealth tax, the only option is selling more of your time!
No-no, work harder! We are only the 3rd biggest economy of the world
How long are Germans gonna take getting shafted by capital…
Most Germans are unimaginative, conservative morons. They keep voting for the very same people that keep on shafting them over and over.
In Germany, there won’t be a revolution, as it would require to step onto the lawn. (Joseph Stalin)
Anything but taxing the people who have hoarded dozens/hundreds of houses of generational wealth
This seems similar in concept to how we have set up the retirement age in the Netherlands, and it is not entirely unrealistic.
People live longer and healthier lives than they used to, so retirement becomes a proportionally larger part of the average life. But retirement also needs to be paid for, so that may not be sustainable long-term. So instead you need to occasionally raise the retirement age, which is politically unpopular.
Tying the retirememt age to life extectency with an automatic mechanism removes the political toxicity surrounding that debate, and makes it more predictable and understandable how the relation is set between life expectency and retirement age.
In the NL for each year your age bracket gains in life expectency, the retirement age goes up by 8 months (the formula is more complex, but that is more or less what it boils down to afaik)
I’m born in 1994, so given the life expectency of my age group (this is ultimately determined closer to my actualy retirement) I will likely be retiring in 2063 at age 69 and 6 months.
The productivity of labour in the west has increased multiple times since the introduction of universal pensions. That is people today make multiple times more goods and services per unit of labour time. It’s why about three working people today feed, clothe and care for 1 pensioner, compared to 10 for 1 decades ago. That along with feeding and entertaining a historically obese ruling class. This alone puts serious doubt in the argument that life expectancy rising making pensions unaffordable. Sure paying less in pensions is one way to resolve the higher cost. Another is to reallocate more of the higher productive output of workers from yachts to pensions. Only one of those is sustainable in terms of social stability.
This is what German productivity looks like just in the last 35 years. It’s ~3x.
Thats a good concept.
Also i think with better productivity the retirement should become proportionally larger. What else if not more healthy and valuable free time is development aimed at?
Higher productivity should either lead to more free time, or an improved quality of life (or a mix of both). If one gets to retire later, but they get to experience a proportionally better retirement, then that could also be acceptable.
Worth noting that wages in the NL do generally go up with inflation, people tend to work part-time quite often (giving them more free time before retirement), and the price of luxuries tends to come down over time (except home prices…)
So quality of life generally tends to go up with increased productivity.
this is a dangerous argument - people may be living longer /on average/ but in many global north countries life expectancy for the least wealthy quarter of society has started to fall even as expectancy for the most wealthy continues to grow
(this argument can end up supporting a society where the poor can expect to not survive to see retirement)
