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Pensioners in Sangershausen (Saxony-Anhalt): Should the entry age be linked to life expectancy?
Photo: Frank May / dpa
Around three months before the general election, government advisors proposed a reform towards the retirement age at 68.
There was a risk of "sudden increasing financing problems in the statutory pension insurance from 2025," predicts the Scientific Advisory Board at the Federal Ministry of Economics in an expert opinion on the future of pensions.
Therefore, the retirement age cannot be decoupled from the development of life expectancy in the long term.
According to the current legal situation, the age limit for the pension without deductions will be gradually increased from 65 to 67 years until 2029.
At the moment someone has to be 65 years and nine months old to receive the regular old-age pension.
The expert advisory board for the ministry headed by department head Peter Altmaier (CDU) is now calling not to stick to the rigid entry age of 67 years after 2030. "Instead, the additional years of life must be divided according to a clear rule between working more and drawing a longer pension." For this, there should be a "dynamic link between the retirement age and life expectancy." The ratio of the time spent in work and in retirement should remain constant in this way.
Based on current life expectancy forecasts, such a rule would reach retirement age at 68 in 2042, said Axel Börsch-Supan, director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy in Munich, who is in charge of the Expert opinion. In its announcement, the advisory board emphasized: "Should life expectancy decrease, the retirement age may also decrease."
This proposal is far from new in itself. In the past few years, the Bundesbank, employers' associations and the Union's pension policy-makers had campaigned for a link between life expectancy and entry age. There is widespread agreement among economists that the system can hardly be financed otherwise - not only among representatives close to the employer such as the head of the Institute for the German Economy (IW), Michael Hüther. Marcel Fratzscher, head of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), who often argues social democratically, sees it that way.
Nevertheless, the current proposals of the government advisors could catapult the topic of pensions more strongly into the debates before the federal elections, which have so far been dominated by corona and climate policy.
The positions of the advisory board are likely to meet with strict rejection from the SPD, the Greens, the Left and the unions.
All the more so as the experts do not leave it at a higher retirement age.
They also call for the increase in pension insurance spending to be dampened.
It is an illusion to expect "that higher contributions and a lower pension level can be avoided in the long term."
In other words: The holding lines of at least 48 percent for the pension level and a maximum of 20 percent for the contribution rate that will apply until 2025 cannot be maintained in the long term.
However, the experts make two different suggestions as to how the "idea of a stop line, at least in part" could be preserved:
Either the stop line - currently 48 percent pension level - is only applied to the entry pension;
afterwards, however, the increases only take place in line with inflation and not, as before, in line with wage increases.
So do France and Austria.
The disadvantage, according to the experts, is "that when wages grow high, people who are very old receive only very low pensions in relation to their wages."
Or the previous system of a fixed euro amount as a pension payment for an earned earnings point will be reformed: Instead, the amount paid would decrease with the number of earnings points.
Specifically, this would hardly affect people with low pensions, but it would affect people with high pensions more.
This would also be a better way of avoiding poverty in old age than with a uniform system for everyone.
fdi / dpa