Right now today, if you watched enough of German news (public TV), looked through magazines like Focus and Spiegel, and listened to politicians and intellectuals argue via public forums....the number one problem in society today is: low pay leading onto low pensions.
How did this come up?
Well....for years, it was quite acceptable for marginal students with no skilcraft or certification, to get jobs with pay limitations. Yes, the guy who worked forty years of his life and retired with a max pay of 1,600 Euro a month (before taxes)....discovering that he's basically got at 66 years old....around 480 to 520 Euro a month in pension.
You could have predicted this back in the 1970s. Part of this issue revolves around the fact that when the Deutsche Mark was swapped out with the Euro, there was this escalation of living costs. Another part revolves around the fact that wages for well over twenty years, have been stagnant. Another segment of this issue involves the flow of immigrant workers into Germany over the past two to three decades, and their arrival meant that a company had cheaper labor, and didn't really need to push wages up or costs to the next level.
Fixing this? In general, the SPD Party....the Greens....and the Linke Party....have taken the view that a minimum pension level needs to be established, and it has to be near 950 to 1,000 Euro per person. Even if you worked at X-level and your pension equals 650 Euro....well, it's not enough. Why is 950 to 1,000 Euro the magic number? No one yet....has developed a science or a logic to explain that....just that it sounds like the best number.
Now you'd sit there for a minute or two, and finally ask.....where exactly will this 400 to 500 extra Euro per poverty-retiree...come from? Well....not the pension pot of money, because that'd bankrupt the system. It'd have to be from tax revenue. You'd have to find something to cut, and to add at least a billion or two in extra taxes.
Would this be of a limited period? That's the amusing part of the story. Once you admit that pensions are too low, the true method of permanent resolution....is to force all wages to increase, and take out additional money for increased pension needs down the road. But that's not the chat topic for the politicians or the intellectuals.
Depending on who does the averages....it's believed that one out of every five German pensioners (retirees) are in the poverty level (below 1,000 Euro a month in income).
Unfixable? You could arrange for a six-hour public forum chat, with forty 'experts' and eventually come to realize that serious taxation increases are coming down the pike....sooner or later (meaning after 2021's German national election).
If you asked me for the fix? I'd go and suggest that the government ought to offer one retirees a one-way airline ticket to the Philippines, where 550 Euro a month would make them fairly well off, but it'd be admitting defeat on the mess created decades ago. Basically, you need to reset the minimum wage business, and get unskilled or uncertified people into a marketable skills path....where they make more because they deserve more.
So if you get dragged into a German pub and Huns-the-retiree gets all emotional about his pension status, and the cost of beer...at least you understand his prospective.
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