The Bill Comes Due

Germany is facing an imminent crisis in its pension system. In this it is hardly alone — throughout the West pension systems are severely underfunded. When unfunded U.S. federal, state, municipal, and corporate pension obligations are added together, the total is catastrophically high. I’ve seen estimates of $14 trillion, and I’m sure the number is continuing to rise.

Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from Ansage.org:

The Gray Bomb: the Collapse of the Pension System is Imminent

In view of the current large-scale mass abuse of basic security by potentially every legal or illegal “refugee”, the fact that the pension system is the first to implode is perhaps surprising. However, the sheer volume of pension payments make up for it (expenditures in 2021: €341 billion, of which €78 billion must now be borne by tax-financed federal grants!) and the unstoppable mathematical fact of a fatal demographic aging trend make the pension system the ultimate time bomb. And it is very likely that this will detonate before the collapse of social assistance, which will soon be euphemized as “citizen’s allowance”.

The alarming latest statements by the German Employers’ Association president Rainer Dulger, who warns in drastic terms of an “imminent collapse of the pension system”, point in precisely this direction. Dulger also sees the potential for the final division of society in the planned “citizen’s allowance”: It cannot be that some of the people who go to work in the morning have just as much or just a little more money available than someone who doesn’t has to get up and go to work in the morning at all. What is needed is “a major social reform that has the dimensions of economic, monetary and social union after reunification,” Dulger told Bild.

Five years until the meltdown

Dulger named the next five years as the window of time when the statutory pension funds would reach their limit, after which the costs would ultimately explode and would no longer be manageable. There is hardly any time left to prevent the “welfare state eating up the future” scenario from becoming a reality. The most urgent thing is an immediate “reorganization of old-age provisions” including a fundamentally new financing model for the pension system.

Although Dulger’s suggestion is not popular, it is the only realistic way: The retirement age must finally be linked to life expectancy. “It must not be that the increasing life expectancy leads to an ever longer retirement,” says the Heidelberg entrepreneur. In order to make the importance of the topic clear, “social policy needs forecasts like climate policy,” Dulger continued: the federal government should report regularly on the future development of social security contributions. “This makes the pressure to act visible to everyone. The reform of the social security systems is similar to the energy transition as a challenge.” As far as the invoked “intergenerational justice” is concerned, it is without a doubt at least as important in the case of old-age provision.

Afterword from the translator:

The money from the pension fund is not gone. It’s just in someone else’s pocket. But it doesn’t matter; the pensioners just have to collect a few more bottles. They’re already used to it so that the enrichers of their culture don’t need to work and pay into the pension fund, as was stated by Merkel and her ilk.

On the other hand, this collapse is only the consequence of decades of over-exploitation of the pension insurance system, which was systematically plundered and misused. This large-scale embezzlement began at the latest in the early 1990s and has continued increasingly unchecked since then. No wonder that Gerhard Schröder, while Chancellor, stopped the “Die Teufelsliste” (Devils List) or “Rentenklau Tabelle” (Pension Steal Table) .In all years in which a calculation/extrapolation/estimate was made by the DRV (German Federal Pension Insurance), the proportion of non-insurance benefits in total pension expenditure was between 34% and 40%. In contrast, the proportion of federal funds made available for this purpose has been between 26% and 27% for years, resulting in a deficit of €909 billion, which is growing with the pension expenditures, at the expense of the insured and pensioners. Together with demographic developments, this is now bringing about the planned catastrophe for the peasants. This will be delayed a little longer by continuing to run the money-printing press, because the political system would hardly survive if pension payments were stopped or reduced. Will a “Soylent Green” scenario be next?

8 thoughts on “The Bill Comes Due

  1. Hence the panicked attempts to stampede the normies into cheering on WWIII nukes and all, while they’re being froze and (soon) starved to death in support of the Cokehead of Kiev.

    Pension payments are no longer a problem when there’s no old geezers left to pay them to. It’s almost a poetic justice or just plain karma. Spend election after election voting for whomever will keep the retirement goodies coming even if it meant allowing the importation of hordes of Turks then later hordes of orcs because allegedly their taxes and fecundity will keep the ponzi schemes solvent long enough for the blowback to only be problems for the grandchildren to deal with.

  2. there are no grandchildren. Have to steal them from another country by expanding the EU. Means no expense on their education and healthcare. Bit like a form of surrogacy, getting another country to spend all that time and effort to have your children. You bring them in as adults, so cheap! Now that the western liberals have enforced abortion on all members there are now no western countries with a birth rate at replacement or above so it has to be the third world providing these citizens.
    Ireland was one of the last countries in Europe which had a birth rate above replacement so it was so important to convince them to have abortion.
    The WEF etc think Africans, Muslims and Vietnamese ( have high birth rate) are going to work and pay the bills and replace Europeans. It’s not going to work. Most of these don’t work so won’t pay the bill.
    GOV has covered it before, the WEF and elites are operating in a fantasy land as this plan is doomed, but too late for white Europeans who will be gone before the failure becomes obvious.
    Many countries have a demographic problem and we are now starting a bidding war to get other people’s children. I see this in the “ education migration” programs.

    • Perhaps the WEF filth publicly spout that line about how orcs are going to pay the bills, but I doubt they are that stupid.

      It was always about the Great Replacement and it’s companion, the Great Dumbing-down. If it was about actually importing productive, taxpaying individuals then they would have focused on bringing in Chinese, Indian, and Eastern European peoples. Instead, miscegenation, welfare dependency, tribalism, mindless aggressiveness (which can be focused against native populations) and low intelligence were the sought-after traits of the “new europeans”.

      You’re right about the grandchildren though. The same dynamic exists in America where almost all the DINK’s are more than happy to be pet-parents and dog-moms to their fur babies instead of actually procreating. And perhaps it’s best they didn’t. They’ll be outbred, and more likely outgunned within a few decades and the surviving females can be crazy cat-ladies subsisting on boxed wine, living alone for the last forty years of their miserable lives until they die at home unnoticed and are eaten by their cats.

    • In response to an article on another site, I pointed out that rich illegal immigration supporters have asked “who will clean out pools and take care of our children?” and offered the opinion that illegal immigration is the new slave trade.
      The problem is, just who will end up as the slave and who will be the master?

  3. Re: “Germany is facing an imminent crisis in its pension system. In this it is hardly alone — throughout the West pension systems are severely underfunded. When unfunded U.S. federal, state, municipal, and corporate pension obligations are added together, the total is catastrophically high. I’ve seen estimates of $14 trillion, and I’m sure the number is continuing to rise.”

    Over a decade ago, I was asked to write a series of internet articles on the coming pension time-bomb. What I saw during my research alarmed me, but since I wasn’t vested in a pension at the time, probably not as much as it would have alarmed someone in that situation.

    The modern bureaucratic nation-state, as we know it today, originated in large measure in Bismarck’s Germany in the late 1880s-1890s. Old-age pensions were introduced, and they provided a stipend to elderly retired workers for a few years at the end of their lives.

    Given life expediencies at the time, and the age at which pensioners became eligible for aid, the system usually ended up paying for five or fewer years of old-age support. Since population levels were adequate and couples of child-bearing age were reproducing at or above replacement levels, the system worked fine.

    The whole system is premised upon there being enough young and middle-aged people working to pay taxes and support a relatively small number of elderly retirees, as well as there being an adequate rate of population replacement. The young must outnumber the old, in other words.

    That’s not what most of the West has now, plus places like Japan. As the mean/median age of the typical Japanese, German or Frenchman creeps up, and the number of retirees and pensioners explodes, there is am ever-greater burden being placed upon those members of the working population in terms of taxes, fees, etc. being paid.

    And since the peoples of these nations are not reproducing in anything like the numbers required to sustain such generous social welfare systems, a crisis is developing and will soon crest as the giant baby-boom population cohort enters its golden years with expectations of the same sort of lavish retirement their parents enjoyed.

    Something’s got to give, or as it has been said: “Something that can’t go on, won’t…”

    Importing hordes of workers from the Third World and other places alien to Old Europe would seem to be one answer, but not really, if you dig deeper. All of those young Turks, for example, in Germany…. how are they going to feel about slaving to pay for the comfortable retirement of native Germans? One doesn’t have to be a genius to see the recipe for dissatisfaction and dissent. And that doesn’t even get into the implications of the whole Muslim-versus-infidel ball of wax…

    Here in the U.S., the federal government can at least “monetize” its debt, in other words, inflate the money supply to cover its debts to pensioners. Those pensioners may be paid in USD which are nearly worthless, but they will at least be paid. The states and municipalities won’t have that recourse, however, and default is a real possibility.

    We’ve already seem municipalities in certain places in California forced to choose between maintaining and funding present-day fire, police and other municipal services, and paying pension obligations to retirees.

    States like Illinois are in the worst shape. When times were fatter sixty years ago, the state government’s employees got their pension benefits written into the state constitution, which means that they cannot be changed or challenged without amending that document. Worse still, the state has been raiding the pension funds for general operating expenses for many years now, decades in fact, so the state balance sheet is a sea of red ink and obligations which can’t be paid.

    In other words, someone is going to take a haircut; the only question remains who will it be?

    The state of IL is between a rock and a hard place. If they raise taxes to the levels required to plug the holes, they’ll drive even more of the businesses now in the state to leave because of excessive taxation, hot on the heels of the ones which have already departed for that same reason.

    If the state doesn’t raise revenues somehow, they’ll have to default at some point. They could cut expenses, of course, and try to make ends meet that way – but this is Illinois and that isn’t going to happen. If the powers-that-be had any self-discipline, fiscally or otherwise, none of this would have happened in the first place!

    And when those promised pension checks and other benefits don’t arrive as promised?? Well, dear reader, your guess is as good as mine… but torches and pitchforks come to mind, and large ill-tempered crowds carrying them. Not a pretty picture, not at all, which is one reason I no longer live in the Land of Lincoln…

    • I doubt there will be torches and pitchforks since the ones with reason to wield them will be too old, feeble, fat, or all of the above to do so.

      If the situation gets so bad that pensions can’t be paid, or are paid in worthless currency there will be far more serious problems demanding the attention of the government than a bunch of petulant old people upset that the quality of life to which they had become accustomed to on the backs of their (or other’s) children and grandchildren has gone up in smoke like their remains through the chimney of a crematorium.

  4. The retirement age will have to be raised (easy for me to say at 74!) but there would have to be allowances made for those in strenuous jobs such as firefighters or building workers.
    Also women would have to retire later as they live longer- I can hear the protests already!

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