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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>I had no idea the economy was like that in Germany.

Addiction to Russian gas, over-bureaucratic system that's super inefficient with tax-money meaning most goes to waste, an ageing population hoarding all the wealth and burdening the welfare system, uncontrolled unskilled immigration further burdening the welfare system and pushing rents up, clueless boomer leaders not investing in innovation and capturing new areas of the economy, refusing to build more real-estate because environment further pushing housing up, politics based on ideology not reality, a clueless and arrogant voter base thinking everything is perfect and none of the issues above need addressing, will do that to you.

Though, that's most of Europe, not just Germany.

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Why is an aging population an issue? Labour participation and productivity is up over the decades, society can produce more than enough widgets to keep everyone comfortable, despite the aging population causing a regression-to-historic-mean in labour participation.

I've done no research and don't have a stake in the game, so I'm blindly just copy/pasting another comment on here. But if it's accurate I could see it being an issue.

> Population is aging and paying for the retirement money for all existing retirees is already taking up over 25% of government spending. There’s barely money for anything else so taxes and social security payments are poised to go up while already being close to ~50% for most earners.

The tax/social contributions stuff can be cherry picked to become very high and very low to support any point people want to make.

There are employer contributions in Germany that are recently counted in such calculations to prove a point, while leaving costs for "benefits" in US companies off the table when doing the comparison.

Some like to add the VAT to the "what life costs here", which is a 19% (except for necessities, which are at 7%).

If you refuse to accept such calculations that mix up tax brackets (popular error in that space), that immediately filters out 90% of them.

> Why is an aging population an issue?

Because the pension is a ponzi scheme. Young people will be squeezed for every penny as the old population also controls the majority of votes. Politicians have known this for decades and done nothing serious to fix the problem.

>Politicians have known this for decades and done nothing serious to fix the problem.

They have always done something. They kicked the can down the road and blamed the previous people in power for the current siltation. Rinse and repeat.

> Politicians have known this for decades and done nothing serious to fix the problem.

They do. They vote to raise retirement age. Then the young people protest.

No, young poeple don't protest. They are happy to hold a slightly smaller bag. Old people who aren't quite over the cutoff date protest.

Who’s going to pay for the current working generation when they retire?

Social security-like systems require a growing population to sustain.

Have you read the entirety of my post?

Labour productivity has gone up (As has labour participation, if you compare it to the 50s and 60s). It should more than counterbalance a demographic-caused dip in labour participation rates. Fewer people, working less, produce more today than they did 40 years ago.

We produce more for less work. Why can't that be turned into a lower labour participation rate, while maintaining the same quality of life, despite demographic shifts?

Yes I read your post it was like half a paragraph…We produce more but there’s more retirees and they live longer.

At the end of the day the contributors have to siphon off part of their earnings to give to the beneficiaries. Believe it or not, there is in fact many scenarios where the entitlements of the beneficiaries exceeds the input from the contributors. Just because we produce more per worker, does not mean we can support any arbitrary ratio of workers to retirees (who become more expensive over time).

Because old people run the country. That is even worse than us having to pay for them. Old men are scared of their own farts and that is not good for the future of a country. We don't want to be stuck living in the late 20th century but that is where all these old people steer the country towards.

It's an issue when you compare what amount of consumption a given job allows. If your wages support old people, some of that consumption is outsourced (outsinked?)

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