Your Pension Depends on Kids You Did Not Have

inigyou

Every pension is a claim on other people's children. That's just how the human lifecycle works. If you can't keep yourself alive, other people are keeping you alive and those people are someone's children. It doesn't matter what financial abstractions we layer on top of this fundamental truth. If you have $50MM of shares that you sell or thirty rental properties, you're still depending on other people's children.

inigyou

This article is apparently propaganda aimed to cause people to have more children. ¿Cui bono? Is Julien worried his own pension won't be covered, or is he trying to enslave his children so the benefits of their work will go to him but not to me? There are far too many humans for the planet to support right now. People never had children to guarantee their future financial stability. It was always some combination of "we've always done it like this" (at a societal level, that's religion), "there's nothing else to do" and "sex feels good". (I know Latin doesn't use ¿ but I thought it was funny)

orwin

Pension==retirement funds here.

danielEM

If system is designed to save for your own pension, and system uses your savings for pensions of others then it is a system that doesn't work, not people looking for 'free ride'. Also, if you want people to have more kids in rich countries you need to find other formula than just pouring money. And it has to be attractive to people, not forced on them.

stockresearcher

I have started to see this argument being made more often, and wonder if it is a trial balloon: we know that discussions are starting to happen about how to deal with the impending US social security trust fund depletion and the cut in benefits that are going to have to happen. You already know that your social security benefit depends on the 35 highest income years during your career. You (probably) also know that each of those years get an index number that is used to adjust your income for the purpose of dealing with the effects of inflation when looking at a 35+ year career. When you file your taxes, you are already reporting the number and ages of each dependent you have. That data already exists. So what if that information is now used as an added indexing factor for each year of reported income? The result would be that the more children you have and the earlier you have them increases the calculated social security benefit. Or rather, since the index would be a floating point number from 0-1, not having a bunch of kids would prevent you from gaining the maximum possible benefit. And it would all be so opaque that it’s hard to notice or understand! Note that I’m not saying this is what should happen, just that it is strange that we start seeing this kind of argument at the same time we see that discussions are happening about making changes to social security…

josefritzishere

This is propaganda of the most obvious kind. You should have a retirement plan. Kids are not a plan.

inigyou

Another relevant point - the birth rate decline is a civilization committing apoptosis - orderly cell death. When a living cell detects that it is full of misfolded proteins, or many other conditions, it will simply commit suicide - breaking open its cell membrane, spilling its contents, allowing them to be recycled, and allowing one of its healthy neighbor cells to divide into its space to replace it. This is a good thing when a cell does it. Elimination of unhealthy cells and replacement by healthy cells helps keep the organism healthy. What does this say about civilisations and the human species?

m463

On the other hand, school taxes are paid for children someone else had. :)