[myrmidon]

IMO Germany is in a pretty tough spot, and lots of countries will run into similar problems because of demographics.

It is very difficult to diminish pension benefits that were promised 30 years ago (when the worker/retiree ration was 4:1 instead of like 2:1) and almost half your voters would be affected (>40% of voters are over 60).

Any "solution" is going to hurt and feel unfair to a bunch of people and it is very difficult to make "young-people-politics" when most of your voters are old (problems probably need to escalate more to achieve approval for anything that financially hurts retirees).

People sometimes like to point at wealth disparity as a real root cause for the floundering pension/elder care system, but even completely disowning the richest 10% of Germans would fund the pension system for less than a decade, so no easy solution from that direction, either.

[triceratops]

> even completely disowning the richest 10% of Germans would fund the pension system for less than a decade

This is a very naive take that assumes wealth gets turned into pallets of cash and those pallets get fed into a furnace when the cash is spent. None of that is true.

Disowning the richest 10% of Germans would be economically disastrous. Levying a 1% wealth tax, payable in the form of assets rather than cash, would produce a very different outcome. The assets should go into a sovereign wealth fund run by some passive algorithm, and its returns must be used solely to reduce income taxes.

[myrmidon]

My point is that this is not a case of "the rich took all the money so we can no longer pay decent pensions", even stripping "the rich" of everything couldnt prop the system up for long at all.

I'm very much in favor of more progressive/capital gains taxation but thats not gonna fix this problem.

[triceratops]

> stripping "the rich" of everything couldnt prop the system up for long at all

I'd encourage you to think about what this actually means. When you say "stripping the rich of everything", what do you imagine happens to the factories and labs and patents and copyrights? Do they immediately cease to provide enough food and shelter and clothing for everyone just because they changed hands?

The problem with actually doing it is that this is textbook communism. Communism suffers from low productivity and competitiveness. It leads to or requires totalitarianism. It's a dead-end. We already know this.

> [more taxation]'s not gonna fix this problem.

I didn't say "more taxation". I argued for a different type of tax system altogether. We haven't really tried more taxation. And we definitely haven't tried what I proposed.

"This problem", namely the problem of people having fewer children, has many causes. One of them is that most households need two earners just to stay afloat*. Taking care of kids after a hard day at work for both parents is hard. The current financial incentives for having children don't come close to compensating for this penalty in time/energy/lost wages.

* Obviously there are others: For instance, Netflix is way more fun than cooking dinner only to watch your kids not eat anything.

[myrmidon]

I'm not arguing against wealth taxation, my point is just that the amount you can extract that way is too small relative to pensions, even under extremely generous assumptions (in Germany, you'd need a ~7% yearly tax on all wealth to pay for pensions, which would be super insane compared to the income-based scheme used now).

The narrative "rich people took/take all the money that's needed for pension funding" is simply incorrect, and that is what I primarily wanted to argue against (the pension funding problem is an order of magnitude bigger than wealth inequality right now).

[triceratops]

> in Germany, you'd need a ~7% yearly tax on all wealth to pay for pensions

That's also how much the stock market grows by on average.