Youth income and pensions.
What is happening in France on the question of pensions is reviving an old debate in which old things are said, but one thing is always forgotten to mention, something that apparently seems to have disappeared from people's minds.
When the need to increase the retirement age is approached, the excuse is always the same: there are fewer young people at work, therefore there are not enough people to pay pensions to the old.
This is a dialectical trick, because in reality it is not the young people who pay the old people's pensions. This would be the case if there was an INPS tax such as "every young person pays a florin".
In these cases, it would be true: fewer young people, fewer florins.
But the INPS tax doesn't work like this. INPS amounts to 24% of income from 21 years onwards, while it is 22.80% under 21. It is a tax, that is, in proportion to income.
Old people's pensions are not paid "by the young", but by the income of the young, or if you prefer by the salary (for employees).
Once the problem has been expressed in this way, we can say that it is more difficult to pay pensions if:
- there are fewer young people
- young people earn less
Or, we can say that it is easier to pay pensions if:
- there are more young people
- young people earn more
given this, the OBVIOUS reaction of governments to population decline, wanting to save the pension system, should be to RAISE SALARIES.
If there are half young people but their income doubles, in fact, nothing changes to the pension system, since it would receive the same amount.
The best solution to the pension problem due to population decline is a general increase in gross wages.
Sic et simpliciter.
France, in fact, today suffers from what happened in Italy too, ie a drastic drop in the wages of young people. It was obvious that, sooner or later, the pension problem would come.
Because the thing you don't want to admit is that our "pension problem" is simply the result of the collapse of wages among young people. Of course, less young people are born, but if they earned, in total, as much as the young people before, the pension problem would not exist. In theory, even a single young person could pay enough, provided he earns 975 billion each year.
But for some reason someone always forgets this dualism between "the young man" and "his income".
It is as if years and years of propaganda have deprived people of the ability to think this simple sentence:
Salaries need to be higher and ordinary people earn more.
It's very strange how no one ever mentions this opportunity. But I think it's a propaganda effect. My definition of propaganda is:
propaganda is the use of free speech against free thought.
This means, very Orwellian, that freedom of speech (the press, TV, etc.) is used to make people lose the possibility of thinking about something: in our case, that the incomes of those who work should increase.
It's a phrase that you really can't think of, and surprisingly I see this difficulty also in other expats, who have gone abroad to get higher salaries, but incredibly they can't think that incomes should go up in Italy.
There have been some very hard strikes in public transport here in Germany in the last few days. All paralyzed. Strikes here are few, but very hard.
If you listen to the interviews with trade unionists on TV, they all tell you the same thing: that they are striking for higher wages, given that inflation has risen. They say it like this, dry. Brutal.
And that's why, even if a strike is annoying, in general these unions are growing in support: everyone who has a salary and has been affected by inflation, in general, would like the same thing.
Mothers of families, fathers of families, singles with a single salary, in short, all would like it. And for this reason, it is very easy to find consensus.
But if I go to the Italian press, “we want more money in payroll” or “we want to earn more” we don't find it. If we look for similar things we find a "minimum wage", which is ridiculous because the problem is to raise them all, and not just the miserable ones, or "we remove the tax wedge".
Making employers pay higher wages, all of them, is out of the question.
It is as if the mind of the people, victims of propaganda, can no longer conceive the sentence
everyone's wages and incomes need to rise.
It is a simple phrase, easy to understand, but as a result of the propaganda it has become difficult to pronounce, even for those who are writing about the strikes in France and pensions.