Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care
dw.com
dw.com
IMO a big factor for the whole sub-replacement fertility in developed nations (and resulting demographic problems) is that the state has invalidated/replaced all the economical gain that families got from children (cheap "workers" and elder care), but the chld-related costs to families have only increased.
Society gains massively from future workers/tax payers, but economical incentives are not aligned at all; children cost their parents a lot, society reaps all the benefits, but does not compensate parents enough economically.
How is it in Germany? I would guess better
also on the attractiveness for women, germany being less traditional means that more women are willing to break traditions, so even if the situation there is better for them, women are still less interested, which means the effect in the end is the same.
As you point out, Finland famously has incredible family support, and also a birth rate under 1.3.
1. Lump sum, pretty big (like year worth of salary or close) payment on birth
2. Works for first child only.
That's it. So, it kinda works, but very limited. Increasing sum did not increase birthrates, if I remember correctly.
Anecdotally, when my grandmother did not birth a child for two consecutive years in her thirties the village priest came to investigate (!!). Expectations have shifted massively since, and the single/dink lifestyle is way more "acceptable" now.
A child might cost its parents somewhere beyond $200k, the parents only get a tiny fraction of this from the state.
And the public paying for education is not a subsidy for parents in my view, but an investment into the children, i.e. future taxpayers (=> the parents don't really gain from that).
All the benefits that used to be there (adolescents helping with farm/work, children taking care of aging parents) became more and more irrelevant, but general costs of raising children (to parents) have not decreased at all (and "reputational" cost of just skipping parenthood is at rock bottom, too, so that is no longer pushing prospective parents towards economically irrational decisions, either).
Yet another reason for others not to chip in your bad ROI decisions then
People who are not flying are also financing airports from taxes.
This is why butthurt "childless pay taxes for schools but not using them" is super stupid
With both of those combined they are currently just redistributing wealth to the elderly that have created this mess.
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.
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.
I'm very much in favor of more progressive/capital gains taxation but thats not gonna fix this problem.
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.
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).
That's also how much the stock market grows by on average.
Unbalanced... The elderly also created most of the infrastructure everyone depends upon.
When you get to be elderly, it will be your turn to be blamed.
I sincerely hope you've had your 2.4 kids to support yourself - that's what the boomers managed and it is hard to measure in dollars or debt. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281453
The idea of monetary debt between generations is just hand-waving (apart from the issue of trying to "color" a dollar via creative government accounting).
Note that government lending in other countries is different when borrowed in foreign currencies e.g. USD or Yuan (ask anyone living in bankrupted countries).
The boomers are dying (20% gone so far) - - in a few decades everyone else will have inherited everything, and the blame will shift to another name.
Oh you mean the same boomers that pulled the latter up behind them via NIMBYism that caused housing prices to explode, starved education funding and made universities expensive, and pushed back on universal healthcare while also getting tax-funded healthcare themselves?
Now they're mad we don't want to have more kids to fund their elderly care and retirement? Those boomers?
The full details are: this is an additional 2.5% non-progressive income tax, two thirds paid by employers, one third by employees.
Other "currently proposed" changes:
Active aging: the elderly need to keep working longer.
Elderly care is pushed onto families.
Elderly care is now much less a right that an individual can enforce. This changes the situation to that the state must put in efforts to care for elderly rather than giving individuals the right to elderly care. Right now an elderly person can sue the government if they fail to provide.
Other various rights are being curtailed. Such as the right to "digital inclusion". The state's obligation to provide access to care offline is dropped.
They updated the law and the contract meant nothing. I mean, he and other teachers occasionally, through long term and sometimes very wide strikes, got some new policy struck down. But never through the courts. They won several court cases against the government, mind you, that was not the problem. But the government simply voted in a new law, including a stipulation that the court case result meant nothing (because of course a bunch of people were owed back pay due to the court's decision. Out of over 10.000 teachers that got court judgements against the government, TWO got paid what the contract explicitly said over 1 million teachers had a right to)
I will point out that the tax increase being proposed here is, of course, ALSO extra money for the state that people are expected to pay in trade for elderly care that the state, of course, ALSO doesn't have the money to deliver when it's needed. In other words, it's demanding the general population pays for a service now, a service math dictates they will never receive.
Oh AND the state is further defunding child care, schools, universities, ... which of course is also being put forward as "families need to take more responsibility".
It seems to me that, all other things equal, future workers/tax payers will lead to economic increases proportional to their costs.
A reasonable forward looking plan / budget scales with the population size. Therefore there would be no need for these special one off exceptions and nudges.
All these little bandaids add up to complexity that necessitates more bandaids.
If your populations shrinks quickly, you end up needing to run the infrastructure (and elder care!) for a whole country with too few working-age people.
This is a massive problem, and some incentive complexity to avoid it is certainly worth it.
But the real problem here is that there are a ton of adults who would love to have kids but are medically not able to for a bunch of reasons, from autoimmune disease to genetic differences to the simple fact that young people get cancer too and infertility because of treatment or the illness is a thing too.
Is it really wise for a society to treat them as if they willingly deny the society additional benefactors and valuable younger members?
It feels wrong for me that you get treated unequally by the law because of circumstances that are not choice-based and your decision to make in the first place.
But honestly, developed countries not having children itself isn't that bad a thing. I feel that our existence and the hedonistic treadmill drains too many scarce resources, and population growth should not last long. On the other hand, it seems societies still gain productivity in spite of the slow population growth. There should be plenty of slack for everyone, so that middle-class parents don't feel like they are constantly in a deathmarch, and voluntarily childless people don't need to be pressured. There's an immense misallocation of resources that is hard to solve, and you end up seeing proposals like this.
But more importantly, people die before enjoying their pension and they don't get a refund.
By the time you start collecting pension, you have effectively ousted yourself from economic production. And unlike a 20yo still in college and not contributing to the economy yet, you don't have 50 more years of your life to worry about. This effectively means it is safe for you to support any short term extractive policies without ever worrying about the longer term consequences.
And demonstrably, this is how pensioners vote — I get to keep my pension, you get to pay more tax. And no we won't let you build any more housing for your beautiful children, we want this town to stay the way it was in 1970. Please come wipe my ass for $15 an hour. And no, don't let people who are actually willing to work that job for that pay immigrate into the country. It's a bunch of feel good policies with insolvable contradictions. Buy because they will not live long enough to feel the backlash, they vote on.
I disagree. The vast majority of jobs are difficult to work at old age and with medical conditions that typically come with old age. As long as we value keeping people alive for their natural lifespan (I hope we do), then our base assumption needs to be that we every time we pay someone we need to pay them $1 for now and $1 for their retirement. Approximately 1:1 because the actually-productive working age is ~25-65 and the retirement age is ~65-105.
Investment returns are never guaranteed, and shouldn't be factored into that.
We're hiring people here, not robots.
1. let vote only people who contribute (pay some minimum income tax) at the time of elections - no unemployed, no students, no retired people - regardless the age, so if you pay your taxes at 14 you are eligible to vote at 14, if you pay your taxes at 88 you have right to decide what will be done with your money at 88, actually I would go even so far that EVERYONE regardless of citizenship should be allowed to vote if they are paying taxes, either they are good paying taxes, so they should be good also for voting
2. other approach would not be tied to income tax, let vote absolutely everyone regardless of age, so even children get vote, so family of 4 with 2 kids will get 4 votes, so they can vote for future of their children and not that retired people are deciding (usually selfishly) future of the kids
I am aware of reality that 1st option would cause huge uproar and second option is more realistic with some countries moving that way lowering voting age to 16 for now.
At the same time I would be glad if we would get rid off Pay-as-you-go pension plan and replace it with own savings account (IRA), but it seems no country in the world had balls to switch, even Chile had to backpedal a bit, but they got the furthest. It's the only solution for demographic changes.
But at the end of the day, the point is moot: if non-pensioners can get their shit together enough to enact such a policy, they can surely organize themselves to oppose any poor voting by the pensioners.
The real problem you're facing is that young people: 1. Don't universally agree with you, and so support the policies you're blaming pensioners for, and, 2. Don't vote in large enough numbers to actually make their voices heard.
If you can fix that, you don't need to worry about disenfranchising a vulnerable portion of the population, since you can easily outvote them anyway.
Do they understand the problem in the first place? Many people can't afford to have kids.
Most people I know with kids can’t afford them and still have them. And most people I know with money don’t have them. In a way it seems wealth is inversely correlated to having kids. It’s not about money, it’s about having interesting stuff to do with your life, and having the education to know what a terrible economic decision it is to have kids.
This is the conclusion I came to as well. I do have kids.
So I wholly agree with the sibling comment "compromise on lifestyle"
I know that the economics don't actually work like this, but this is the social contract.
If your pension benefits are calculated based on a 4 workers/retiree ratio, but then your whole generation has like 1 kid per family then the system will obviously break down...
Productivity gains on the other hand get easily eaten up by increased consumption/expectations, or are overstated to begin with: producing 5 times more TVs/ipads does not make the plumber cheaper (nor a house), and unaffected professions actually suffer (=> baumol effect).
Is that because higher earners make higher contributions to the pension plan?
Retirees then get paid based on how many points they have.
Both the worth and the "cost" of those points scales with average income every year.
This basically autocompensates for inflation and rising wage levels, but decreases in population size are problematic.
But the social contract does not care about that.
Except the farmer demands you grow while stomping all over you, and then reserves the fertilizer for the dying crops.
Wrong. Poor people have 0 problems having kids.
People can afford kids, they don't want to compromise on lifestyle.
The general income tax brackets break down in Germany is as follows:
- Up to €12,348: 0% (Tax-free allowance)
- €12,349 – €69,878: 14% to 42% (Progressive increase)
- €69,879 – €277,825: 42% (Proportional rate)
- Over €277,826: 45% (Reichensteuer or "rich tax")
Source: https://www.expatrio.com/about-germany/german-tax-system
IMO: that doesn't look "super low".
A better tax system is the one used by Estonia: a flat tax rate of 22%
Source: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/estonia/individual/taxes-on-per...
People could feed kids, but they can't afford to give their child a lifestyle similar to their own childhood.
A simply WILD statement given the rates of children raised in poverty with all the trauma and issues that gives, who then oftentimes grow up to be their parents doing the exact same thing.
> People can afford kids, they don't want to compromise on lifestyle.
Previous generations didn't have to, ours does. So if people don't want to make that compromise, they won't.
Maybe if we made it systemically a bit less awful to be parents more people would do it.
Like, again, still beats the shit out of America's system, but it's far from perfect too.
i have been there, and i disagree. it's of course about attitude. and yes, sure we didn't get expensive clothes, but that wasn't an issue not in the school i went to. things might have changed, but i am sorry, it's not the problem of a welfare system to account for materialism. i was a boy scout and i got all my clothes from army surplus stores because that's what we were into. not the army style, but the sturdy hiking stuff. i was able to save up for an expensive leather school bag, not the cheap stuff everyone else in school had. i could do that because we were thrifty and didn't waste money on other unneeded luxuries. fun foods, treats? why? i am a lot healthier now because we didn't get that, and, most importantly, there was never any desire for that either. so no stress at all. as a child i never once felt that we didn't have enough money. i was proud of the way we lived.
i raise my kids the same way now. money is not the issue here. our toys were almost exclusively lego. lego is expensive, but only if it is new and if you insist on expensive presents every year. it also lasts a lifetime. you don't need to spend a lot every year to have enough to play with. and nowadays there are alternative brands that are a lot cheaper and just as good. oh, we also had comic books. lots of them. we bought and traded them on flea markets. why would they have to be new, when you could get them used at a fraction of the cost?
that's assuming the parent is devoted and caring
in your scenario the parents already failed. again, it is not the job of the welfare system to account for bad spending habits. but i get it. that argument is not new. i heard it already when i was young. and i just didn't get it. i was able to afford everything that i wanted, and i never felt i was missing anything just because our money was limited. i didn't feel that the money was limited. i didn't know that i was poor. my classmates in school didn't know that i was poor. i didn't notice that some other kids in my class were rich either. even those who actually were. at worst i saw some kids spending money on things that i would never waste my money on, but i didn't envy them. i was able to participate in every scout camp and trip that our group was doing. i was a member of a sailing club and made my sailing license. i was able to travel to various countries in europe and even to america. by the time i finished school i had done more traveling than any of my peers.
sure, i had financial support for that airplane flight, but that's the point. these things are available to everyone, regardless of income. anyone who doesn't take advantage of what is offered is either blind, ignorant or stupid.
to summarize: money is not the issue. what matters is a society where people care for each other and make efforts to ensure that everyone is included, regardless of their income. the problem is, that people don't see that. they argue that the money is not enough, when in reality the problem is lack of education (how to spend your money wisely), the wrong values, false pride that prevents people from accepting help, envy, selfishness, i don't know...
Unpaid work. If that work were paid enough through tax incentives and state aid, people would have been having children. But it's not. If they have children, they will be working intensely at their day job in an economic environment that expects ever-increasing productivity from everyone, and then doing more work when they get home. Japan did that. People started collapsing where they worked or stopped having children. Now they are trying to reduce workload, increase financial security and increase wages.
Germany set itself on the road to depopulation.
Money is like violence. If it didn't work you didn't use enough.
> why not to punish the culprits out of spite?
Is there a difference between penalizing the (by choice) childless and lavishing money on those who have children? Seems about the same to me.
That was in the earlier decades when there actually was a social contract. Now the entire society is a profit extraction machine that has people working until they drop.
> monetary incentives for children are empirically proven to be very ineffective
On the contrary. Monetary incentives made immigrant families raise numerous kids. The problem was that natives of Germany weren't doing it. Or, maybe very few from the very low income segments were doing it.
why though? if you feel that way then in my opinion there is something wrong on your expectation of your lifestyle. or rather, on what our society projects what our lifestyle should be like.
but in my opinion we are also doing it wrong. we delay having children for to long, and we spend our 20s either working to hard or enjoying our freedom, and then we have children in our 30s and 40s and then in our 50s we are to old to enjoy the rest of our life. if we had children in the early 20s then they would be grown up in our 40s and we would be able to enjoy our freedom then. get the hard stuff, including raising children out of the way first.
of course, in order to do that, we need a society that values and supports that. and that's what we messed up in the west. in china it is much more normal to have children early, and people are more supportive and tolerant.
sure, having children means that my freedom to do something else is limited. but i don't see that as a burden. it's a choice. and i don't regret that choice one bit. i wanted this experience, even if it went differently than expected. in that sense, expecting that you won't have time for something else is good. but make it a positive choice, not something that you only begrudgingly accept because you feel you have to. if your children feel that you felt forced to have children they will resent you for it. it diminishes your love for them, at least in their eyes.
children can be a challenge, they can demand sacrifice, but every minute i spend with them also enriches my life, and when they are grown up and have children on their own i will look at them as a challenge that i have mastered, not a burden that i took on to fulfill a social contract.
"This perception, however, is false. In most human societies, poverty does not predict higher fertility, and well-to-do families often have the highest fertility. When families in America have more money, they tend to have more children. The stereotype of fertility being skewed towards low-income women is a product of basically two data analysis errors: 1) failure to control for important underlying cultural stratification, and 2) failure to adequately deal with the relationship between age, income, and fertility."
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-...
Well yeah, if they are falling across all income levels then not being able to afford children can’t be the reason.
I've heard it many many times from many different people, and not once has it been the actual reason.
They have no vision for the future and no idea how to bring Germany forward other that taxing the poor.
The actual monetary cost of a child is high, for sure. But many people put that number higher due to lifestyle choices, not need. Social media certainly doesn't help.
The snarky nonsense is not helpful, or appropriate, for this forum. Do better.
Computers also became ridiculously cheap in real dollars over the years, in the meanwhile education, healthcare, housing all shot up faster than overall inflation.
It.... literally isn't? the cost of computers are lower today (in today's dollars) than they were in the 1980s and 1990s?
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2021/09/20/cost-of-a-computer...
Obviously it's not about just computers. The point is we spend more on this stuff than we did in 1980. That is a fact.
Items like smartphones are dramatically cheaper than the tech people bought in the 1990s. It replaced your home phone, video camera, answering machine, alarm clock, clock, etc. You are not correct at all, the things that have gone up in price are housing, education, health expenses, etc. Not electronics.
The point is that people are choosing to have fewer children, and it's absolutely not because of the cost of computers or cell phones.
While wealth disparity is also a problem, solving it would NOT solve this one: In Germany, completely disowning (!) the richest 10% (!!) would not even pay for a decade of pensions.
Society would be very dull with that many old people. But other than that the reasons aren't obvious to me. Let's say the worker ratio was 4:1 80 years ago, which was sustainable. If 1:1 is unsustainable, that means each worker today doesn't produce 4x as much as a worker 80 years ago.
But that's not true! In fact in the US, labor productivity is 6 times what it was 80 years ago. [1] A worker today is equal to 6 from 1947, in terms of the value they create. So ask yourself: why isn't the math working out?
Pensions have to not rise with wages for this to be useful. Which simply isnt happening in practice (yet?)
Also no meaningful increase in housebuilding, nursing, plumbing, childcare productivity; even worse, rise in general productivity increases costs (Baumol effect).
I'm very confident that we can make the math work out one way or another, but this might involve sacrifices that people dont even want to contemplate (yet!).
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/07/29/fewer-adults-ha...
But aimed at childless women? To balance things out a bit?
you want parents to be able to live in the same desirable places as childless couples. and especially as the kids get older, they want to live in the places where other young people live, and where all the action is. that tends to be in the city centers.
And yes, kids cost that much.
I'm a senior level software engineer in the bay area. I don't have kids. I don't think I can afford them. I'm tired of people telling me I can afford them. The world works differently today. In the 1980's, if you had a stable job that let you leave at 5pm, you could more or less handle kids.
Today, leaving at 5pm means risking PIP and not having an income; your company may lay off people randomly without notice; your rents could go up 10-20% unexpectedly; groceries could double in price over a couple years; you basically need to be working round the clock to not get PIPed and even sustain an income. And if you work around the clock you also need cash to hire nannies because you don't have the time to raise them yourself. As such I wouldn't even think about kids in this world without having saved up the full sum of my expenses AND their expenses for their ENTIRE life until 21 years old in CASH before even having the kid. We just don't have the job security today.
Where does the money come from?
It's not my problem, really. I'm very happy childless. Unless that money materializes, I can't afford kids.
Social Security is funded by a 12.4% income tax, with half nominally paid by the employee and half nominally paid by the employer.
You'd need a similar tax to fund such a benefit, which would amount to a 15% income tax, assuming the program isn't too successful in raising birth rates.
you’re probably making like 500k TC
if you’re 30 and worked in tech you should have around 1m nw
if your partner makes 200-400k you can afford to have children
i see arab/muslims and mexicans here with like 3-4 kids. i live in sf, so somehow they’re able to do it without a high paying tech job.
That isn’t to say you should have kids. That’s a really personal choice. And it can come with huge amounts of extra anxiety around job security, for sure. But there are tons of options for arranging life and work to make it happen if one really wants to.
Look, my electricity bill doubled. Will the landlord pay for efficiency upgrades? Nope. Will the landlord still increase rent? Hell yes. My water bill doubled. Extrapolate those numbers.
Taco Bell used to cost $5 for a meal, and now costs $14.
My $5 sandwich now costs $15.
50%+ of my income is lost to taxes of sorts. Before you lecture me on tax, I know my taxes better than you know me. Sales taxes, self-employment taxes, tariffs are all taxes.
I get hit with $5-7K of medical bills a year. With insurance. I have a rare idiopathic heart condition, so that's my cost (systematic tax) to stay alive, and probably would be the cost for a potential genetically-infected kid to stay alive as well. I also pay $3K/year in orthodontics last and this year, and another $2-3K in preventative care out of pocket. After my orthodontics is over, I'm sure some other $4K/year shit will come up. I'm stashing up cash for all of this.
"Live in the Midwestern United States" and "avoid San Francisco", you say. But there are no jobs there. None that I could get. Everything I could get wanted me to be 3 days/week on site in silicon valley. Jobs that I found in even LA or Boston were literally half the salary or less. Jobs elsewhere were less than 1/3 the salary. Considering more than half my salary goes to taxes, tariffs, and more taxes of sorts, my partner and I really need that cash.
I don't have time to cook every meal at home. I don't have time to see kids. I'd get PIP from my job if I did that. Today's jobs don't let you work 40 hours a week; you need to work closer to 80. At my last job I worked 70 hours a week and still got PIPed. My coworkers took my ideas, finished them on weekends, worked 100 hour weeks, presented to leadership on Monday without my name. I didn't meet the "bar". My work is making millions for a big corp as I write this. Just not in my name.
Public schools are expensive. Because you pay for it in housing costs. Wherever housing is cheap, public schools are shitty. I live where housing is cheap, relatively speaking, for the bay. But I don't have kids, so it works out.
My financial planning model works like this.
For every $1 I need to support myself and my partner, I need to earn about $8. $4 goes to <strike>taxes</strike> government laundering, $4 left. For the $4 left, $2 goes to retirement (base assumption is the economy is now irreparably broken and S&P500 isn't necessarily going to grow in the next 40 years like it did the past 40), $1 goes to my catastrophe fund (in case of very realistic war or AI unemployment), $1 goes towards spending now.
My partner and I barely meet that 8x bar. That is my bar to feel safe. I couldn't meet it with kids. Without kids, we have a sane and happy life. Everything is covered, from the taxes to the whopping medical bills to housing. End of story.
This is Germany, not the USA. Shit doesn't work like that here.
Except, of course, reduce income inequality, address housing shortages, that sort of thing.
Adoption. At least that was the choice one of the gay couples I know made.
Free rider? I am already paying close to 30% of my income for the state to distribute to ALL.
At the end of the day, taxes don't being to compare to the lifetime (and compounding effect) of children. And yes, you have a good point. You pay taxes (a lot) and so it makes these conversations difficult.
My own country the Netherlands got rid of the private/public distinction. Everybody is insured via a private insurer. They can't reject patients and patients are allowed to switch insurer up to once a year. Insurers also work with health care providers to make sure money is spent more efficiently. Meaning hospitals can't just offload their inefficiencies onto insurers. And insurers can't just offload that onto patients. Because the patients switch to the insurers with the best relation ships with healthcare providers and the best deal. They all have to provide the same base coverage but you can insure for stuff on top of that.
The Dutch system also has its flaws and deficiencies. But my parents together pay much less than me by myself in Germany. And as far as I can see from their recent experiences, they are well looked after. It seems the Dutch system has a lot less bureaucratic nonsense, better information sharing, more modern hospitals, etc. It also has underpaid nurses, issues with some types of medication not getting covered, and a few other issues. But compared to the expensive German mess; much better.
Germany is mainly legislating to kick the can down the road instead of addressing any of it's structural economic issues: a government bureaucracy that stifles innovation rather than promoting it, a pension system that is essentially a underfunded slow moving train wreck at this point, broken physical and energy infrastructure that will take decades to fix, and a hopelessly inefficient health care system.
1. the difference for the (public) elder care (Pflegeversicherung) is already there: a fee of 2.4% vs. 1.8% with kids (or much less with more kids). And it was now proposed to slightly increase the fee to 2.5%, i.e. +0.1%. But as it was recently increased several times (nearly every year) this is a strange suggestion and looks helpless.
2. this small increase (<1 billion €) does not fix the existing financial gap of approx 4 billions. The gap will increase a lot for the next years.
I don't have children and this doesn't seem inherently unfair to me. It's an acknowledgement of the care labor these households are doing.
That said, I'd prefer to see it be progressive by income as well. A couple without children in the bottom income decile shouldn't be paying more than a couple with children in the top income decile.
I can easily understand that if everyone went my route (i.e. no kids) that society would collapse by definition, and my later years would be inherently miserable. I'm depending on others that do have kids (and sacrificed a lot in their 20s, 30s and 40s, a sacrifice I was not willing to make) so I can pay for medical and aged care when I'm old. So paying a slight amount more for this support seems highly reasonable to me.
Speaking as a German with children: Completely apt image. Yet I would name several dozen of policies that are more serious "rakes in your face" than this. This is merely squeezing a little bit more out of the working population. Everyone knows that social security in the current state is a Ponzi scheme and what ever is collected is immediately redistributed.
It explains how we got there, the problems we are facing, the problems inherent to the proposed/possible solutions, etc.
(*) as in, they really try hard to stay neutral on the topic until the end, in the clearly marked conclusions and opinion section.
What this proposal would change is the concrete percentage. Currently 4.2%, 4.7% if it were enacted.
The plane was overweight so they were choosing reservations to involuntary bump to the next day and of course we were selected. No amount of reason mattered; if they bumped us based on an “average weight”, they’d be no better off than when they started.
We should really gamify the system as much as possible to make it fun for everyone involved.
Prospective adoptive parents need to assume a difficult years-long process with no guarantee of placement, mid to high five-figures expenses or more (prohibitive for the average non-FAANG Americans), assume major undisclosed and significantly heritable mental health disorders, assume undisclosed in-utero substance exposure requiring challenging and costly care, and be aware of revocation periods up to one year in length.
I've seen people exhaust themselves financially after many years of trying only to be told by agencies they were now above the age limit. I've seen people learn later of a family history of not just Cluster C or even B disorders, but A. I've seen revocation on the last day of eligibility at the one year mark.
International agencies are notorious for not disclosing previously diagnosed FAS, drug exposure, autism, and other major medical issues to the receiving stateside agency a consistent problem adopting out of Eastern Europe, especially.
Too many good homes who would love to adopt are being put off of the process. We need major adoption reform so eligible parents have a relatively smooth process they can trust.
For all my horror stories I've also seen it work out wonderfully for people, and wish you the best. In my book it's one of the noblest things anyone can do.
I never do anything without being financially ready. I'm a big believer in only commiting to something when I have the cash to allocate for all of it. I wouldn't buy a car, house, anything without actually having the cash for it.
it’s more like getting into a cold swimming pool, you’ll never be fully prepared you just need to jump in
I'm not sure I agree that it is unfair, I'd need to give it more thought. My initial reaction is that there are all sorts of burdens that we want to incentivize people to take on that not everyone can take on, through no fault of their own. For example, we want people to serve in the military, and we provide all sorts of benefits to people who do, but some people are unable to join the military through no fault of their own (e.g. they are blind).