Saturday, November 21, 2020

Pension Chatter

 Whenever you get around Germans and the term 'pensions' get brought up....there's always a side-discussion on how the federal/state employees have their own program, which always seem to be better funded, and 'unfair'.  

I noticed this morning a brief note or two via N-TV (commercial news in Germany), where some CDU political party folks....are chatting over an idea to radically change the government worker pension program.

What is being discussed is this idea to make a step-by-step program....where government workers would eventually reach the stage of normal pensions (unlike government pensions are now), and they'd reach statutory pension insurance.

From the year 2030 on....for new folks arriving into a federal/state job, there would be one insurance program.  For older folks, the program would exist until they were all retired out.

Odds of this passing in 2021?  The CDU would have to convince the SPD to put support behind this idea.  So far, the SPD hasn't said much.  Government workers?  Most would say it doesn't affect them...it'd only affect future hirees....so they probably don't care that much.  The big criticism?  Basically coming from the police union.  

In a public setting....most think there ought to be just one single pension program, and a fair number of Germans think government workers retire and 'get-rich' off their program (an arguable point).  

2 comments:

Daz said...

Or they could just offer everyone participation in the government one. Interesting how that was never even considered as an option.

Schnitzel_Republic said...

You'd be escalating the whole pension chart, with employers contributing more money, and pushing prices for services and products up another notch or two.

I won't argue....the government program is way better, but the government is the one pushing extra funds in to give them the five-star pension program. Oddly enough, if you think about it....the extra funds for the government program...comes out of sales taxes and income taxes of plain regular people. They are the ones funding the five-star government program.