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Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care

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Re: Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care

#171

Post by triceratops »

bigballsbjorn wrote: post #169
zrn900 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they require a lot of "labor" from you 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 collapsin…

why would it be paid? you get the value back through the social contract. monetary incentives for children are empirically proven to be very ineffective. so the ship will go down regardless. why not to punish the culprits out of spite?

> monetary incentives for children are empirically proven to be very ineffective

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.

Re: Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care

#172

Post by triceratops »

myrmidon wrote: post #100
abc123abc123 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machine needs more tax payers to keep politicians flying around the world in private jets. Produce tax slaves people, produce them now!

This is reductive, and incorrect. You simply need working-age people to run stuff, full stop. Approaching a 1:1 ratio of workers/retirees is simply unsustainable (yet), for very obvious reasons. 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.

> Approaching a 1:1 ratio of workers/retirees is simply unsustainable (yet), for very obvious reasons

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?

1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHPBS

Re: Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care

#173

Post by triceratops »

myrmidon wrote: post #93
hobofan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not wrong. But the reality of this government in Germany is that they are also cutting down on the assistance that parents receive. With both of those combined they are currently just redistributing wealth to the elderly that have created this mess.

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…

> 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.

Re: Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care

#174

Post by ProfessorLayton »

robocat wrote: post #161
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US at least the majority of current elderly (boomers) fought tooth and nail against infrastructure improvements, and when they did happen often funded them with debt to pass the cost off to someone else. The Greatest Generation (WW2) and Silent Generation did the heavy lifting here.

The US is an economy - what matters is the resource flows within each day or year. 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 account…

>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.

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?

Re: Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care

#175

Post by myrmidon »

triceratops wrote: post #172
myrmidon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is reductive, and incorrect. You simply need working-age people to run stuff, full stop. Approaching a 1:1 ratio of workers/retirees is simply unsustainable (yet), for very obvious reasons. 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.

> Approaching a 1:1 ratio of workers/retirees is simply unsustainable (yet), for very obvious reasons 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…

Rising productivity is a weak argument imo for several reasons:

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!).

Re: Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care

#176

Post by myrmidon »

triceratops wrote: post #170
myrmidon wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to pay taxes and have kids for the numbers to work out. 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...

But why ? That would imply a worker 30 years ago produces only as much as a worker today. Which is obviously untrue.

No, it would only imply that the worker/retiree income ratio (and tax/pension burden) are somewhat constant which is arguably the case; german pensions specifically rise with wages and get adjusted for inflation.

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).

Re: Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care

#177

Post by myrmidon »

triceratops wrote: post #173
myrmidon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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, wo…

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.

Re: Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care

#178

Post by em-bee »

bigballsbjorn wrote: post #168
em-bee wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

children will massively compromise your lifestyle 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…

its true tho, basically all the time after working your 9-5 you have to invest into your children. i personally still want to have children in my mid 20s. i don't really care about the downside due to my ideological conviction. but even if you are a rational actor and respect the social contract you must bear the burden.

yes, but this should not be seen as a compromise of your lifestyle. especially if, as you say, you actually want children. you are doing yourself a disservice. looking at children as a burden will only grow resentment.

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.

Re: Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care

#179

Post by dchftcs »

Jamesbeam wrote: post #142
myrmidon wrote: post #6

There's a bunch of criticism, but this is in my view the only general approach that makes sense (globally) and should have been done 50 years ago already. 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-rela…

I think that someone gets an overall tax rebate when they have children is a reasonable decision for a society to make. 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 th…

Lots of things that are wrong are also imposed on parents. Not to say involuntarily childless people are to be blamed for anything, or that two wrongs make a right, but society is immensely misaligned against having children, and forced charity already exists in various forms whether you like it.

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.

Re: Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care

#180

Post by nowandlater »

ghusto wrote: post #134
qurren wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to incentivize people to have kids, hand out $500K-1M to anyone who wants to have kids. Don't penalize those who don't. 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, y…

> Today, leaving at 5pm means risking PIP and not having an income; This is Germany, not the USA. Shit doesn't work like that here.

It also doesn't work like this in all job domains in the US. These hyper-competitive FANGlike employers are meat grinders. You can live well enough on a modest wage a few hundred miles away in the Central Valley working for a public institution with a pension. It still exists even it's less so than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
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