Les Jones

Population > Germany Considers Pension Cuts for the Childless

Politicians Discuss Pension Cuts for Childless Germans:

New statistics confirming the declining birth rate have sent Germany in to a state of panic, amid a growing consensus that pensions should be increased for people with children and reduced for those without.

"People without children should either receive a reduced pension or pay more into pension schemes," said Norbert Geis from the CSU.

Johann Eekhoff, director of the Cologne institute for Economic Policy said a reform of the pension system was long overdue.

"People without children should never have been admitted into pension schemes because these only work when they are financed by subsequent generations," he said in an interview with mass-circulation Bild newspaper. "Their pensions should be cut by 50 percent."

As Mark Steyn likes to say, any country that promotes a central welfare state is going to have to have pro-natalist policies, or the welfare state won't survive more than a couple generations. The catch is that the welfare state seems strongly correlated with lower birth rates, potentially creating an unsustainable system. What's a socialist to do?

To quote another Steynism, "The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism."