The debate about the retirement age at 68 is heating up the minds.
Several experts see a need for action and demand political measures - but the GroKo parties appease them.
Berlin - A sensitive topic was on the agenda before the Bundestag election - for many election campaigners, the development is anything but convenient: The topic of pensions is heating up people's minds anyway.
At the beginning of the week, advisers from Peter Altmaiers (CDU) Ministry of Economics provoked heated debates.
They called for the statutory retirement age to be raised to 68 years.
Economists urged politicians not to turn a blind eye to the looming problems in financing pension insurance.
“Demographic change is just there,” explained Axel Börsch-Supan, lead expert on the advisory board at the Federal Ministry of Economics.
He is campaigning for the retirement age to be raised to 68 years.
The reason: increasing life expectancy must also result in later retirement.
Retire at 68?
Economist compares impending danger with climate change
The economist from the Max Planck Institute in Munich also spoke on
ZDF
about the topic of retirement at 68 and drew a comparison with the threat of climate change - here, too, people shied away from taking the problem seriously for a long time. According to Börsch-Supan, also a professor at the Technical University of Munich, 28 percent of the federal budget is currently used for pension payments (and pension entitlements) alone. He warns that the share could rise to half of the budget - unless countermeasures are taken in view of the impending problems with financing.
In the
picture
, the controversial economist Bernd Raffelhüschen predicted the “ruin” of the old-age provision system introduced under Konrad Adenauer: “The federal government can now only choose between plague and cholera: Either it increases the contribution rates for the pension fund.
Or the federal grant has to grow enormously. ”Whatever the decision:“ In the end, the pension system will fly around our ears, ”the economist from the University of Freiburg is convinced.
Raffelhüschen had already warned Merkur.de at the turn of the year that the last grand coalitions had "generously given the electorate majority of the elderly".
Raising the Retirement Age: Necessary Debate - or Premature Scaremongering?
In any case, the standard retirement age will be adjusted to 67 years by 2031. The director of the Institute for Macroeconomics and Business Cycle Research (IMK), Sebastian Dullien, sees no need for a further adjustment of the entry age. “I don't see why you should start talking about what happens afterwards. Whether someone will be able to retire a month earlier or later in the 2030s, nobody needs to know today for planning security, ”he explains to the newspapers of the
Funke media group
. He emphasizes that assumptions about the development of the population and pensions with a lead time of more than ten years have often turned out to be wrong in the past.
Altmaier himself emphasized, however, that, in his opinion, the current increase to 67 years should remain.
His ministry also pointed out that the scientific advisory board at the Federal Ministry of Economics is independent and works.
"The gradual increase in the standard retirement age to 67 years by 2031 fully absorbs the increasing life expectancy," said SPD leader Saskia Esken.
The fact that the German pension system is ultimately much more complex and that the contributions from the pension insurance are not only used to finance the retirement benefits originally intended for statutory insured persons is another matter.
In addition, the CDU caused a stir at the end of 2020 with the proposal to break a taboo.
Will civil servants also pay into the pension fund in the future?
(PF with dpa)
