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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that what they get is unsustainable. The public is on the hook for paying those pensions for decades. Which means there will be an ever-increasing pool of public retirees that that taxpayers will have to fund.

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This is what should be scary. If this "crisis" is just because we know the numbers now, and there's a hidden crisis in the public sector where people don't even realize how screwed they will be a decade into their retirement? 401k plans are way more opaque than pensions.

401ks were a way for shareholders to reap outsized returns from corporations while saddling workers with their own retirement costs.

Everyone here complains people haven't saved enough, yet wages have been stagnant for decades.

only if the population is increasing.. and if the population is increasing, then the burden to the taxpayers is spread ever wider.

the problem starts when the tax income shrinks

No, only if public sector and life expectancy are increasing. And they can be increasing just as well in a shrinking demographic.

Raise taxes on the assets of the wealthy, crack down on tax havens and it "magically" becomes sustainable again.

No, it doesn't. California pensions for example are such that even if the state dropped all other obligations and paid only pensions even with massive tax increases pensions could not be fully paid. This mess will unwind in the short term. Yet another argument for some kind of basic income alternative.

Please show me the math on how you are going to give everyone a pension greater than the GDP per capita by changing tax law.

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