Wie Europa gegen junge Menschen Krieg führte, um ihre Renten zu bezahlen

>#How Europe waged war on young people to pay for pensions

>__Countries are taking drastic action to rein in spiralling state pension bills – could Britain follow suit?__

>When King George VI signed the National Insurance Act, the state pension became the foundation of British retirement.

>Since 1948, its universal payouts have rescued millions of people from a retirement of abject hardship – and undoubtedly some from an early grave.

>Before the ink had dried, however, an eye-watering bill was looming. Its architects confidently forecast an outlay of just £501m by 1978, but none foresaw future generations quitting the coal mine, having fewer children and living well into their 80s or 90s.

>When 1978 arrived, the true cost had spiralled to £7.6bn – around 15 times above budget. By the end of the current decade, fuelled by the triple lock, it will hit £181.2bn, an increase of over 25pc in just five years.

>The problem has also become entrenched across Europe and governments are inadvertently pitting old against young in a desperate battle to balance the books.

>Older generations, who feel they’ve earned their payouts, can watch on contentedly – safe in the knowledge that their pensions will keep rising – as their governments ratchet up retirement ages for younger generations and the contributions they must pay in.

>But across the divide, many young people – now expected to work for longer to foot the existing pensions bill and losing faith that the state will be able to afford such payouts by the time they retire – are taking to the streets.

>A bubbling resentment threatens to spill over.
The increasingly urgent question is how Britain, facing its own huge bill for pensioners, will solve this problem. Can it take inspiration from its European neighbours?

>__Sleepwalking into retirement__

>After an unprecedented post-war baby boom, decades of falling birth rates and rising life expectancy, a fifth of citizens in the UK and Europe are already over 65.

>By 2050, this will hit one in four in the UK and almost one in three across Europe.

>Two thirds of EU residents also have no pension savings, leaving up to 170 million people sleepwalking towards a retirement on state-sponsored benefits.

>European countries have attempted their own solutions with varying degrees of success.

>For some, the simplest and fairest way to cut state pension spending was to increase the age at which people can claim it. With life expectancy increasing into the 80s, these nations argued that people didn’t need to retire at 60.

>In Scandinavia, the state pension age is now linked to life expectancy. In Finland, it is rising to 65 and Denmark has already passed a law to raise it to 70 by 2040, while in Sweden it will soon hit 67 for those wanting to claim a payment without any reductions.

>All three have a formula for increasing pensions each year, based on wages and inflation, and Sweden refuses to pass on any increases in times of economic decline.

>Crucially, none of the three governments had their hand forced by the triple lock and opposition was muted at best. Protests were small-scale and calm, bordering on polite, while the threat of strikes never truly materialised.

>It’s a path that successive governments in Britain have also walked, beginning with equalising women’s state pension age with men’s from 2018. The now-universal age then increased gradually to 66 in 2020 and will take another two years to hit 67 in 2028. Even the rise to 68 is not expected to be complete until 2046.

>But this has done little to rein in costs so far. In 2018-19, state pension spending was £96.7bn, but it will hit £154bn next year – an increase of almost 60pc since equalisation.

>The key driver is the triple lock, which continues to hamstring any politician who might want to eradicate it and still have a chance of re-election.

>Introduced from 2011 and widely believed to be the only such measure in Europe, it guarantees that payments will increase by the highest of wages, inflation or 2.5pc and no government has looked to scrap it since.

>By 2030, the measure will cost £15.5bn a year, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility.
France hits a roadblock

>Far from raising their state pension age, the French hold the distinction of being one of the only European countries to have reduced it. In 1982, as part of a radical left-wing agenda, President François Mitterrand decided that it should fall from 65 to 60.

>France now has one of Europe’s lowest retirement ages at just 62, and hands almost 15pc of its GDP to pensioners.

>Faced with an unsustainable bill, politicians decided something finally had to give. In 2023, President Emmanuel Macron passed reforms to increase the age to 64, using a constitutional clause to avoid a vote in parliament.

>Trade unions responded with 14 days of protests, attracting well over a million people nationwide, and at one protest in Paris, the Place de la Concorde was set alight as over 120 people were arrested in clashes with riot police.

>Macron’s government narrowly survived a no-confidence vote from furious parliamentarians. Late last year, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu eventually postponed the changes until after the 2027 presidential election – a move expected to cost more than €2bn.

This will definitely be one of the key questions to figure out going forward. As now 80+ average age is normal, e.g. in Madrid 85 is the average life expectancy, the books are really difficult to balance if you contribute 30 years of your 85. I think in the next generation we will see a drastic increase of pension age, probably even into the 70s in some cases.

Is waging

The real issue is that most European pension systems were designed for a completely different demographic reality. Longer life expectancy + low birth rates were predictable, but reforms were always postponed because they’re politically unpopular.

And many young people are still convinced that fighting for lower retirement age is a good thing for them. It’s insane how sensitive of a topic it is, even though the bills will hit our generation in the face when time has come. 

And yet our societies have allowed for parasitic and non-contributing multi-billionaires (soon trillionaires) to exist.

Young people are effectively financial slaves to the pensioners. The old consistently vote for policies that maintain their generous pension/benefits, it doesn’t matter if the economy is doing poorly, their benefits never take a hit because they force working people to pick up the bill.

With birth rates crashing, young people will never be able to vote in large enough numbers to fight against this parasitic relationship.

You’ll never read that kind of stuff again after Axel Springer buys the Telegraph

Must have been nice for those who retired at 55 and got to enjoy retirement.

There was an article a while back which suggested that let’s raise the pension age to 75 since people in their 30’s and 40’s don’t expect to retire before that anyways. It’s like let’s make their fear come true. Truth be told, as 41 year old I don’t expect to retire and receive state pension anyway. The retirement age has probably “run off” by then judging by the way things are progressing and the state pension changed or out of money or whatever. I mean 30+ years is a loooong time given that every 4-5 years new parties come to power and whatnot. There’s no assurance.

As someone younger than 40 I’m fully prepared to retire on death, this is a worldwide thing but yes, turbocharged in EU. A lot of social policies *could* come into place but probably not from the current generation? The 60+ crowd will hold on to dear life, quite literally, to the existing pension plans and their precious home/asset valuation, before even thinking that another way of organizing society is possible at all.

This is the reality too in America as social security balloons. I’m running off the assumption that I’ll get nothing from the system I contributed and am aggressively saving for my own retirement.

My biggest concern is that despite me saving and investing as much as I can the state will just tax that heavily as well and ask for social security contributions on top.

The general trend is that over the last 30 or so years, all benefits for working people have slowly shifted to pensioners.

People went into retirement, the budget was out of balance, and to compensate benefits for working people were diminished but touching pensioners was a taboo.

Guess who the largest voting block in history are… Sometimes it feels like 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner. Year after year statistics show that our pensioners are the wealthiest in the world. But they still think they should get more.

Economy as Ponzi scheme

What about home affordability? Ah no, let’s make the people hate grandpa and grandma

I understand that I won’t be able to retire like my grand-parents did in their late 50s. They spent their 60s-70s-80s chilling, shaping bushes in their garden and drinking lemonade in their veranda all day. Even though I make more than they did…

I plan on turning myself off once my body and mind start feeling like it’s the end of the road. I’m expecting it to come around once I’m in the 45-55 years old range. I made my peace with it.

My finances are doing good because I don’t have kids. I’m not bringing kids into this system just so the richest parasites can keep this up. This is how I revolt. A lot of my friends and colleagues feel the same way I do. We all know what’s coming.

In the past, the retirement age in some European countries has been quite low. It really only now that some are moving up to 65 while others are just starting to think about 66 or 67.

And people think I’m joking when I say that my millennial retirement is a 12 gauge.

And for some reason young people in France are protesting against raising retirement age. They should be fighting to raise it so that each of them don’t have to pay pensions for 3 pensioners.