So on my social feed I see a lot of Bulgarian stuff, seeing as how im based here, and often, it will be memes about how the German minimum wage is like 2k euro or something and the Bulgarian one is like 600 Euro (fun fact, it was 150 euros a month when i moved here)
and i dont understand why people fail to understand that a country with probably a population of barely 6 mil and no industry, would have equal wages to the EU's biggest industrial centre. Like, how is this hard to understand?
I often see something similar with pension numbers, and again, it got me thinking, how do smaller countries even manage a pension when the number of working adults is so low?
like Bulgarira has just over 6 mil population, of that number, probably 4 mil working and population decline showing that in a few decades, there might only be 3 million people.
and i honestly wonder, how does a pension even work in that context, is it just 'you will have a very small pension?
course, it's not just population, Russia has plenty of working people, and their pensions are dogshit too.
,
Declining population and high costs compared to productivity are the issues.
In defined benefit pension systems, which I think is what tend to exist in Europe, the current workers pay the benefits of the current retirees. These tend to just be Ponzi schemes and fall apart if the working population stops growing.
US pensions have largely transitioned to defined contribution systems. These are actuarially sounds, because each worker sets aside money (involuntarily) for their own retirement. These retirement funds are often able to be invested as the individually wishes, within a variety of constraints. The issue is that poor investments can lead to insufficient funds to actually support the retiree.
Any pension system are a scam scheme. The most common is the Ponzi as you said.
Yes, defined contribution plans are a scam that funnels capital to the corporate donors who own the approved investment vehicles.
EXACTLY! Perfect observation.
They paid us bad inflated money and steal a bit to fund the creation of new ones, cleaned and not inflated.
yeah, most of Europe , if not all, is current workers paying for retirees, of course, if you tried to do a US-style system, I don't know if people would go for it because Europeans are, generally, terrified of investing, they just want their cash in the bank with 1% interest
You could do defined contribution that way. People just wouldn’t have to be really frugal in retirement.
Te imaginas cuba 🤣 antes las personas estaban locas por llegar a viejos para el retiro 🤣 ahora tienen 90 y siguen trabajando porque no les alcanza ni la pensión ni el salario 🤣 y de 11 millones ya bajamos a 9
No matter where you are in the world, I think the pension system is a scam. The only truly secure pension or retirement is the one you secure yourself, through work and savings in assets over decades. Thinking that the state does a good job of taking care of us when we can no longer work is a more profound illusion than the current state of paper money.
that's why i plan to be on the bitcoin pension plan lol
Excellent, that's what they call a fully awakened mind.
Wages and pensions only work if there’s enough productivity and workers paying in. When the population shrinks, everything gets tighter.