Only it doesn’t. None of them work.
It’s the 800-pound gorilla locked away in every country’s closet – for now.
Germany struggles to fix its pension system – Germany’s aging population is putting the country’s pension system under strain. The new Labor Minister Bärbel Bas has ruffled feathers with a proposal for how to fix it.
Good luck with that.
Why should Germany’s?
They are all brilliant systems and they all work the same way: You pay into it your entire working life while your government pumps in ever more money to prop it up and thus burden future generations with massive growing debt (interest rates rock). This Ponzi scheme only works if parents have way more children (at least three on average). It stopped working a long, long time ago, in other words.
Germany struggles to fix its pension system – German society is aging fast and the working-age population is shrinking. There are new plans to make the pension system fit for the future, but critics have said they won’t work.
That means net pay from the gross. And gross is it ever. Only Belgium (think Land of the EU) does it better. Meaning worse, of course.
According to a report just published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Germany has the second biggest tax burden worldwide. And we’re talking about middle-income people here, people. Not millionaires or anything.
The OECD calculated each country’s tax wedge – the gap between what employers take home in pay and what it costs to employ them, including personal income tax and social security contributions. Germany had a tax wedge for single, childless workers of 49.4 percent, behind Belgium at 54 percent. That means nearly half of a single person’s income goes towards taxes and social security contributions in Germany.
Please remember this the next time somebody starts telling you again how wonderful everything over here in ze Europe is (“socialized medicine” and all that). There simply is no free Mittagessen (lunch). You can go broke eating free lunch over here.
„Die Belastung der Bürger ist deutlich höher, als uns bewusst war.”
Remember: Germans have more words for taxation than Eskimos have for snow.
Observing Hermann 