cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6837465
Even though right-wing politicians decry immigration (because it’s a populist viewpoint), they secretly or openly want more. Countries without low immigration will lag economically compared to countries with high immigration such as the US.
Original link: https://www.ft.com/content/de913edd-71d1-4a36-b897-091125596952
Young people will fix shit. Western European societies have significantly ageing populations. That means they need to choose between three options to maintain their pension systems:
Cut benefits for pensioners and/or increase the retirement age.
Increase taxes for the young to pay for pensions for the old.
Keep tax and benefit levels the same, but allow foreigners to move to Western Europe where they can work and pay taxes.
1 and 2 both have huge intergenerational consequences - and bluntly, having seen how the baby boom generation have pulled the ladder up behind them, I have no great urge to pay taxes through the teeth for the rest of my working life to fund their cushy retirements. 3 hurts nobody and benefits everybody - it’s a no-brainer.
The main problem in Germany is, is that there are different pension systems for privileged classes (Politicians, Civil Servants, Doctors, Lawyers, Bankers) and the REST. The privileged classes are fighting tooth and nail to prevent THEIR pension services included in a singular pension system. Another problem is that only the workers are paying into the system - if you earn income from any other sources like being a landlord or owning vast wealth and accrue interest - that income does not count for the pension fees.
This is just a very short abstract and it doesn’t really capture the complexity.
As you have written that they could lower the pension… the pension by 2035 will be 43% of your net income before taxes. The average German pension is about €1500 per month (those privileged classes I talked about before, have multiples of the average German pension)
What you mention are indeed major problems, but the main problem is still the ageing demographic. Even everybody paying into one pot won’t fix the mismatch between payers and recipients we’re going into in the coming years.
And what happens when those foreign workers in Solution #3 age, retire and need pension payouts…? Just keep hiring more and more foreign workers? Besides, “benefits everybody” is only from an national economic perspective. From the cultural, social and personal economic perspective, having a huge influx of foreigners in your country is terrible.
I don’t think foreign labor is completely off the mark but there has to be guards against them costing more money than they contribute to the system, which means strict culture, skill and income requirements for permanent migration.
What about a fourth option of reducing the amount of old people?
Besides that the only feasible policy would be temporarily cutting retirement benefits. If it’s permanent it would never be accepted by anyone and neither be fair.
More immigration simply delays the issue a few decades into the future.
Reduce the amount of old people? What do you mean?
“Congratz on turning 65! Here is a sweet little cyanide pill. Take it and now go die already! We would like to keep our money, please.”
Regarding cutting retirement benefits, I’d argue that this should be a matter of redistribution (few get a high pension, and a lot of people can’t live from their pension and are currently depending on additional financial aid) and merging the two class pension system into a single one.
More targeted immigration for younger people can indeed help to tackle the reverse pyramid demographics in Germany.
No of course you don’t give people cyanide pills. But it natural corrections are avoided like by war or by diseases like covid, we need to do something.
A humane way would be to simply cease life prolonging treatments from a certain age onwards. Do we really need to waste resources on someone who is over 80 just to let them live one or two more years? It would make more sense to instead make their death as painless as possible. Of course that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t treat them at all. A broken arm still should be treated. But maybe don’t keep them alive on respirators for months of years when there’s no chance of improvement.
The only way the pension system can be fixed would be to radically alter it. One of the things necessary is something you already mentioned in a way. Setting a limit on how much pensions someone can receive. But more importantly anything you pay into the pension system via taxes should be kept in the system for years or decades. Whether that money is invested for greater profits or simply left to accumulate interest. Essentially have people pay in for themselves. That way the money has decades to increase. Any excess profit can be used to increase the pensions who people who have earned too little for their own pension.
And again, immigration won’t fix anything. It does not fix the demographics pyramid. It simply adds even more people that in the future themselves will have a claim to pensions. Then you will again need even more people. This would require an ever increasing population when what we really need is a decreasing population.
Yeah, since war and covid are “natural corrections”…
Dude, what the fuck? You are actively advocating for the death of people. I share a certain morbid enthusiasm about humanity, but what you suggest is simply cruel and there is so much what I find wrong (based on my ethical framework) about what you said regarding this.
How old are you? If you are about 30 or already above, live up to your suggestions and go ahead dying, because that’s what the life expectancy probably was in pre-modern times. Got vaccinated against something? Forget it. Ever got a fever and needed antipyretics? Enjoyed food and water, free from pathogens? You should’ve been dead. Where do you draw the line? There are plenty of 80+ year olds who are still kicking and enjoying life. Heck, there are even more fit 100+ year olds than decades ago.
It’s not a waste if we can ensure by that way that people enjoy a long and fullfilling life. Everyone who lives should continue to be able to do so, because almost everyone who is alive wants to live. Not you and not I have got anything to say against that. Do you really want to live in a world where we kill our elders at some point because of financial concerns? How would you feel about that if someone comes to you on your 80th birthday with a death pill?
That’s the only thing in your misanthropic perspective which I understand and can even share to a certain degree. You are missing the complexity of that topic here and I don’t want to dive into that right now. So let’s just say that the vast majority of 80+ age old people are not on life support and we are simply talking about the pension system.
Regarding your pension suggestion: Yeah doesn’t sound so incredibly disgusting then killing our elders, and I don’t disagree. So that might be something worth to investigate.
Immigration is only one foot in an approach to mitigate this problem. As far as I see it, ideal demographics would have - at the limit of sustainability - a rectangular shape, about as many young people as old people with birth rates matching the death rates. The birth rates in Germany are declining since several decades. I don’t know the detailed list of reasons, but one of the reasons I know is that having children is not sufficiently attractive. (This again has several influencing factors, like societal, financial, time-wise, … .) So it’s obvious that it’s very important to fix this structural problem. Making having and raising children attractive again. But, even if Germany would be able to establish the necessary circumstances to achieve this in no-time, it still takes at least about 20 years until those newborns are ready to contribute. And that’s where immigration comes in. Germans still need to fill those crucial gaps to continue living by the standards they are living in. You can’t magically create those people from nowhere. So you need to draw them in. And since killing older people is 100% off the table, other measures are required. Increasing the retirement age is one option, but that is met with outcry. Most don’t want that. Immigration is another option. Meanwhile fixing the birth rate problem is another important problem, which has to be tackled. Redistributing wealth among the people is also another option. Doing investments with pension money, somehow like you suggested it, might also be a good idea. And so on… There are several ideas how to solve this, but I’m pretty sure that immigration can’t be avoided to achieve that goal as soon as possible.
Are personal insults and bad faith arguements you have in regards to an overpopulation of the eldery? Fact of the matter is that humans are getting too old. The majority of people past 80 are not healthy anymore. Neither can or should they be expected to still work a job. Raising the retirement age is out of the question.
So many personal attacks trying to beit me into “hah gotcha!” moments and strawmen. But I gotta disappoint you. No I don’t want to live past 80 personally. I’d be completely fine with dying at that age. I’d be fine with being denied life prolonging treatments. It seems to do not even seem to bother argue my position. I specifically said we should stop life prolonging treatments at a certain point, not actively kill people or deny them any treatment for not life threatening health concerns.
There is nothing misanthropic about my views, nor am I making them out of financial concerns, but out of concerns for human society and its prosperity. Ever thought beyond just pensions and healthcare systems? How an ever aging society will lead to a social standstill and eventually societal stagnation? Or how older people hoard wealth? The majority of housing and any monetary wealth is in the hands of the older generations and until they die it will not reach any generations after them. Not unless we have an entire social revolution regarding property and wealth.
Several things to unpack here. You’re coming from a position where you view it as necessary to keep the population growing or at least at the same size. Unless we fall beyond replacement levels for humanity as a whole, that is no real issue. It’s only problematic for our systems built on permanent growth. Degrowth itself isn’t an issue, it even found more and more advocates over the recent years.
Regarding birthrates it’s a too complex issue for current governments to handle within our current system. Children are already subsidised a ton by the state in Germany. Something that people without children (whether willingly or involuntarily childless) already have to pay for via excess taxes. Just subsidising children more will not fix the issue. It’s a wider issue where working class people at large do not make enough money anymore nowadays. Any other issues can be traced back to that. Take for example the issue of a lack of childcaring services and teachers. If they paid more to their teachers and employess, they would not have a lack of workforce. Too much has been redistributed away to the ruling class since the 90s.
What insults?
What is your definition of “too old”?
It would be good to have some numbers on this. I can’t look for some right now.
However, what are your standards for “being healthy”?
Having manageable diseases is not equivalent to being connected to and depending on life support machines.
I would make such a decision not generally, but on an individual basis. Incorporating the fitness of everyone seems fair. What are your reasons for why they shouldn’t be expected to continue working for a couple of years?
Yeah, sure. It’s all personal and not regarded to your views and opinions which I find shitty. /s
When do people start to realize that respecting a person is something different than finding their opinions bad?
To make it clear, I still respect you as a person, but I don’t agree with some of your views. Even more, I actively find that those really, really suck.
If you felt insulted as a person, that was never my intention. So please clarify where you felt like I insulted you, so I can react to that accordingly.
Alright, no one is stopping you from that. But I’m pretty sure that most people would like to stay alive.
And I find it wrong to deny them this just because it is appears challenging to care for them right now while upkeeping the standards of living in a nation like Germany.
You specifically said:
“Reducing the amount of old people” sounds pretty active to me. Denying them treatment which could cure their diseases or upkeep a high quality of life is an active decision. That’s deliberate acceptance of suffering and death. Letting someone die, because they got a morbidity after reaching a certain – almost arbitrary – age, may less be an active killing, but it’s still negligent homicide.
Also, regarding the treatment of life threatening health issues, a lot of diseases may start harmless and become life threatening when left untreated. Say an infection of a wound for example. May be harmless at first, sometimes the body is able to fight it off by itself, but sometimes it is not and needs support. And then there are diseases which are already present before someone reaches pension age.
Also, aging and death itself can be understood as a disease, which humanity is fighting since even before they were humans.
Where do you draw the line?
No? Talking about pension and suggesting we should, as you put it, “reduce the amount of old people” has nothing to do with finance?
A few lines later you say in the same paragraph:
To sum up, “I don’t want to let old people die for financial reasons, but I want to let people die for financial reasons”.
Contradicting much, doesn’t it?
Besides the matter that, “prosperity” can also be understood as a financial matter, could you please clarify what you mean with “human society and its prosperity” in the context of our discussion? That’s so abstract that it could mean anything.
Regarding wealth and housing, referring also to this:
Due to the fucked up inheritance laws in Germany, society as a whole does not really profit from the death of those old people, because those are bequesting it almost tax free to their descendants. So just a small group of rich people stay rich and get richer. Even if they die and their younger descendants take their place, most people won’t profit from that in any way.
I’m not sure about the revolution part, but at least we seem to agree on the importance of redistributing wealth somehow. That could also help with the aforementioned inheritance issues.
Yes. To a certain level I do.
I’m not talking about humanity as a whole, but about the population in Germany.
That’s the lesser issue here, I’d say. It’s currently a problematic topic in Germany, because there are a lot more old people than young people. This will lead to a significant decrease of living standards and probably bring along a bunch of other problems, since few younger people need to support a lot of elderly.
You may also find me on the degrowth side often. But please, by other means than death.
Brith rates worldwide (as a whole, not necessarily individually per country) are declining by the way.
There is no societal issue a government can’t handle. That’s the whole purpose of having a government.
And yet there is talk about child poverty since years. It seems what you view as “subsidised a ton” differs a lot from what I, parent associations and a bunch of other instutions criticise. It’s something, but sadly not a ton and not enough.
Yes. But it will help until the structural problems, the causes for these problems, are fixed.
I basically agree with you concerning the rest of your birthrate paragraph.
Maybe the boomers can learn from their parents and throw the old people into incinerators every Tuesday
No.