Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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.