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Hopefully, some nation somewhere will have the epiphany that, in fact, there is not a need to transfer large sums of money to the elderly.
Based on the demographic decline, it can be assumed that some significant amount of these elderly will have had no kids. Which means they had their fun spending on themselves in their youth. That is to say, they have had their cake, and there is no need to then let them eat it too.
Those who have had kids can be supported by their descendants, who will at least be freed up from having to pay for somebody else’s old person.
Pensions are old men cutting trees down.
In general, the social state is fundamentally corrupt, divorcing people from their action's consequences. (Alas, we don't have to imagine the block voting to increase their privileges... We're already stuck in a doom loop.)
Pension/Social Security is just deferred compensation with the usual government fuckery.
Pension/Social Security is more like young men planting trees, but the government confiscates many of those trees under the pretense of insurance/Equity. Then, several decades later when a given former young man (now not such a young man) would like to retire, the government will return some lumber, that may or may not correspond to the present value of the trees the man planted when he was younger.
I have nothing against older men who would like to recoup their deferred compensation.
But most people do in fact not plant trees. The vast majority of economic activity produces things that are either consumed almost immediately or can't be conserved for the time scales relevant to retirement. A worker in a power plant can't store up lots of kilowatt hours to then use them up over his retirement 30 years later, for there to be electricity at that point there needs to be a new, younger worker taking his spot and giving up a share of his production.
Financial abstractions like saving only work out if the material economy on which the financial stuff is making a claim on continues to exist up to the point in time where the saver wants to convert green paper into actual goods or services. The causal mechanism isn't saving, it's having children and ensuring that they become productive participants of the economy.
Also massive amounts of the population don't cover what they take out of the public spending apparatus especially when it involves a lengthy retirement period with significant medical support.
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The problem with making older men whole on their social security contributions is that
That money is gone, long since spent on whatever stupid shit the government does (by this point, social security is old enough that the money has chiefly been spent paying out social security benefits to even older men, who are now dead).
Social security always promised more out in benefits than was paid it. It was structured like a pyramid scheme, and inherently reliant on forcing every new member of an exponentially increasing population to enroll at gunpoint. So when fertility collapsed...
The only ways to keep giving old people their promised benefits is one of:
Keep borrowing money until nobody is willing to lend anymore. We already owe Lord Tywin three million gold; what's another 80,000?
Keep printing money to inflate away the entitlements. Sufficiently high inflation is indistinguishable from a default.
Keep importing immigrants to pay for the benefits, replacing your people to kick the can down the road a few more years. Except, a lot of those immigrants are going on welfare and making the problem worse. Hispanics and H1-Bs are productive; Sub-Saharan Africans, MENAs, and Haitian refugees are not.
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If that's all it was, sure. The problem is that Social Security is effectively a ponzi scheme. Total payouts are far greater than total contributions, with many retirees able to claim roughly 250% of what they paid in as benefits. Social Security was (and is) dependent on population growth because there need to be more people paying into it than receiving it. The only way to fix this is to dramatically lower the amount that retirees get from SS, and that's a political non-starter even after all the boomers die because that means gen x and millennials will be the ones who paid in significant amounts that they won't ever get back.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/lifetime-social-security-benefits-and-taxes-2023-update
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