My Visa bill? I'll pay it with Mastercard!

The pension system has been a Ponzi scheme since the pension reform of 1957. This is not news and was well known BACK THEN. The previously funded pension funds simply perished in World War II. The pension level was accordingly miserable in the midst of the economic miracle, which opened up a populist election opportunity that Adenauer seized by the scruff of the neck. The pensions of the generation whose contributions burned in the war were paid with the contributions of tomorrow's generation, kicking the can down the road. This worked as long as the population pyramid was actually a pyramid and the economy grew rapidly. Even back then, economists like Horst Jecht or Wilhelm Röpke predicted exactly what is now coming back to haunt us. Röpke even called the pension reform a "social policy chain letter" (the term "Ponzi scheme" was not yet common)

The honest approach back then would have been to relieve the war generation whose pension fund had perished through tax revenues - but that would have alienated working voters for Adenauer. So he held people liable who could not vote: unborn generations

When "boomers" today insist that they have "paid into the pension fund for forty years," they are either incredibly uneducated or lying with deliberate intent. Neither is this a pension fund at all, nor was anything "paid in."

There is no clean solution. Either we have an end with horror or horror without end. The later we dismantle this Ponzi system, the harder the fall will be. We can discuss social compensation when dismantling this Ponzi, but "continuing as before" is not an option.

The pension system MUST be wound down.