The health and social success of live longer becomes, fiscally, a paradox: the longer we live, the more we crush the model that finances our longevity. We are, therefore, in a moment of pay more pensions, and also, for a long time longer.
We have already said before that longevity is the real Government desperation. My nutritionist told me a few months ago a phrase that I think has become a harsh reality: “The Government will never prescribe free Ozempic to lose weight, because almost all causes of mortality are related to the overweight and if people consume it a lot, will lengthen even more life expectancy«Which no executive wants today in Europe or, at least, does not plan to encourage it too much.
This comment will undoubtedly be questioned by many people, even though it was made by a doctor with 40 years of experience, but society must intuit something about it. He Ozempic It is a diabetes drug that is being prescribed to lose weight since plate in part the feeling of appetite. Recently, there has been a shortage of this medication and some pharmacies even put up a sign on the door “we don’t have Ozempic”.
Let’s talk about aging. According to the INE, 16,902 people currently live in Spain with 100 years or more. But what is relevant is not the absolute number, but rather its growth exponential: in 2030 there will be about 33,000, in 2050 they will be close to 100,000, and in 50 years they could multiply by 12to exceed 220,000 centenarians. Those over 90 years of age, for their part, already exceed 600,000 people, more than 1% of a population where children are not born.
I assure you that those figures are going to stay shortbesides. Longevity thus poses a first-order economic dilemma: pension systems were born at a time when life expectancy after retirement He was barely over 10 or 12 years old. Today, that horizon has doubled, tripled…
Recently, we interviewed in Investment Strategies to a biotech manager to tell us about his fund. We invited him to eat afterwards and he told us some chilling ideas: “those born after 1970 will live 120 years. That doesn’t mean that everyone will reach that number, but that when that entire generation is gone, the average age It will have been 120”. And he added two more things, which are more scary: «Children born after 2010 will live 200 years. And work is already underway on life expectancies of 1,000 years. That person is about to be born or could even have already been born».
The aging and ‘excess life’ of pensioners is being corrected at a forced pace, clumsily, without a structural vision… but voices have already emerged in Germany or France warning that pensions, as they are conceived, They are not viablewhich has caused headaches from the minister who said it.
Public provision is the great political issue and the great focus of spending. Right now, as I write this, on the street I am seeing about 30 protesters asking “decent pensions«Escorted by two police cars and blocking traffic. 30 people cause chaos in the city and mobilize two police units?
That is the weight of a group that is on its way to 11 million, it has its income automatically indexed to the CPI and they have upper middle income to that of the workersthis devastating fact, which also goes unnoticed by people.
As it happens with the increase in self-employed quotawith the suffocating IRPF, the state of the trains and roads, the persecution of capital or rampant corruption: the social reaction oscillates between the purest indifference or, at most, it develops in the trenches of militant frontism.
The distribution model on which the Spanish system is based works under a simple principle: the current workers they finance the pensions for current retirees. But when the number of contributors per pensioner is reduced—and each pensioner lives longer earning money—the equation becomes unsustainable.
Retirement becomes a complete second financial life. On a collective scale, this “second life” has to be financed by the first.
The dependency ratio, which measures how many workers there are for each retiree, has steadily deteriorated. In 1970 there were almost four workers per pensioner. Today we barely exceed two. The demographic projections They anticipate that, without structural changes, this ratio will fall below 1.5 by 2050.
Meanwhile, pension spending is already around 12% of GDP, and could reach 14% in less than two decades. All this with a system that, as we have indicated, automatically revalues benefits according to inflation, which guarantees purchasing power but multiplies the structural cost. Salaries, meanwhile, are falling.
The first group of Spaniards who will live normally beyond 90 or 100 years is already here. Many of them retired at 60 or 65, and have been receiving a benefit for more than 30 years. If it is measured in terms of life career, they have spent more time earning than contributing, but in absolute terms many people who have worked for 30 or 40 years and have enjoyed retirement for 40 or 50 will also surpass it.
That solutions Is there for all this? Many, designed and implemented by competent personnel and not politicians. And understood by knowledgeable people, not bored retirees who block traffic to pass the time.
I can think of a transgressive one: giving the citizen the option of get off the welfare state and the Social security. Give up pension, health and education, in exchange for receiving half of the social contributions, personal income tax and VAT himself. With that, would double their income practically and could begin to generate future assets where, of course, the state would not be able to get its hands on either.
How many people would want that? Surely, everyone who had financial trainingthe one that public power detests so much.