New pension package: The young can be gutted like Christmas geese – column

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Seniors in Düsseldorf: departure of the strong boomer generation

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Michael Gstettenbauer / IMAGO

I'm not usually into generation bashing, it usually bores me.

I can't do much with the supposed or actual specifics of generations X, Y, Z, although I enjoyed reading Douglas Coupland's book back then.

But after last week's pension scandal, I'll make an exception and say: You're all rags, you boys.

Do you hear?

Rags!

You let yourself be gutted like Christmas geese and keep your beaks shut.

The assembled Red Front of social politicians are cashing in on you, and you may even think that's justice.

Where is your anger when you need it?

Last week the federal government presented its pension package II, and I bet that Ministers Heil and Lindner themselves did not hope that they would get off so lightly with this concoction: the costs of aging in society as a whole are being completely unilaterally burdened on just one generation.

Employees' contributions to pension insurance will increase by at least 20 percent if only much smaller cohorts remain in the market after the strong boomer cohorts leave.

In addition, the same workers will have to finance a rapidly increasing subsidy from the federal treasury with their taxes.

And they will also use their taxes to pay interest and repayments on those debts that are invested on the stock exchange and are intended to bring income for the elderly.

That means: The young ones give up two or three times, the older ones not once.

This calm can be understood by anyone who wants to, but I can't: the old eat up the future of the young, and the young also do the washing up.

No other burden could be distributed by the government as unfairly as the cost of future pensions.

No other group could offer this: If the government treated asylum seekers, queer people or red kites like this - the Greens and the Left would run amok.

If it were so against the farmers, they would have burned down the Chancellery long ago.

Yet – paradoxically – young people have recently started to rebel when they get the feeling that climate protection is about their future.

Fridays for Future have already driven more than one government forward with large demonstrations.

The Constitutional Court has for the first time seriously assessed the freedom claims between the present and the future, clearly in favor of young people.

I fear that it will be a long wait for a comparable constitutional complaint regarding the deprivation of freedom due to excessive social burdens.

If it's a simple matter of your own wallet, the next generation will have maximum trust in God and politics.

And I wonder why.

Yes, there is the so-called neglect of future needs.

But when it comes to climate protection, we are currently in the process of refuting this economic law and the inherent pessimism: A lot of efforts are currently being made to shape the future up to 2045 and beyond, at enormously high current costs, both politically and financially.

For some, that's still far too little, and so they keep pushing.

But when it comes to pensions, no one is putting any pressure on young people, even though the tipping points of the financial meltdown are in the much nearer future and can be calculated much more precisely than any stage of global warming.

Maybe it's like this: Unlike climate protection, it's not the drivers who have the strongest image for themselves, but the brakes: that of the poor pensioners.

For years and decades, the country has been taught that all older people always have too little, that any further support is self-explanatory and that any reduction is forbidden.

This runs deep.

Facts cannot break the poverty framing.

In 2019, around half of all pensioners had income other than the statutory pension.

Seven out of ten retired couples lived rent-free in their own four walls.

And for years there have been only three percent of all pensioners who receive basic security in old age.

No other large group has managed to ensure that just three percent are representative and policy-making for the remaining 97 percent.

The image of poor pensioners seems stronger for younger people than that of melting icebergs.

So much so that the Minister of Social Affairs can boldly claim that only a pension package that leaves everything the same for the elderly can prevent pension cuts.

In reality, a different, fair distribution of burdens would have only meant that the average pension would grow somewhat more slowly than average wages.

When conservatives or liberals sometimes talk sobly about a left-green “cancel culture” – when it comes to this topic, it really exists.

Anyone who dares to question the widespread poverty or risk of poverty among German pensioners needs to dress warmly.

I speak from experience, but I can't understand it.

Because it would only be fair that the generation of pensioners, who will probably be better off than anyone else before them, should share in the costs that the poorly qualified aging of society raises.

After all, it is the boomers themselves who, due to laziness and childbearing, have had significantly too few children in order to refinance their old age for society as a whole.

But no.

Well, as one of these boomers you could sit back and say: after us, the stupid ones, as long as someone else foots the bill.

But conservatives think differently.

They took their children to many places in their early years - and now it has to be hunting too.