Is Germany being unreasonable? Childfree adults paying more for elder care

[Fauxlein]

"Childfree adults to pay more in elder care contributions — report
According to a report from German media group RND, federal Health Minister Nina Warken has prepared a draft bill that would have adults without children pay a higher percentage of taxes towards publicly-funded elder care.
The bill would have contributions from childfree adults increase by 0.7% over a period of years, meaning they would pay 2.5% of their income each month. Their employer will be expected to pay 1.8%. For adults with children the rates will remain the same: 1.8% for people with one child, 1.55% for people with two children, and 1.3% for people with three or more children.
Under the proposal, all adults over the age of 23 who are working full-time would be affected.
It is unclear when Warken, a member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), will submit the draft to the cabinet. Her ministry had originally said it would present a proposal for elder care reform in mid-May. With a long-stagnating birthrate mildly buoyed by immigration, Germany needs to act fast to make sure older generations can be taken care of without placing an undue burden on young people."

YABU - German Health Minister is being unreasonable, it's not kids responsibility to look after elderly parents and is unfair to penalise child free people
YANBU - this seems like a fair counterbalance to increasing costs to the state of elder care

It's the wrong question.

Nobody chooses to get older and need care. I think we all agree on that so I think that essential care should be free.

The bigger questions are
(1) what is essential care? Should the state pay for all issues?

Take obesity as an example. Governments are quite happy to let companies sell shit food at tax it a little but they don't want the healthcare bill. But they pay it. If they simply didn't permit those products, they'd have the money to pay for long term dementia care.

I accept that ita a crappy and oversimplistic example, but I think the point stands: Gov can't pay for avoidable costs then pass unavoidable costs like age onto the individual.

This isn't an entirely new thing. In Germany people without children have paid more into care insurance since 2005.
The system is totally different from that in the UK. Adult children are expected to fund any shortfall for care for their parents.

Yes they have. When they wwre children

And they would have supported their parents, so it evens out.

What you're looking at here is the children that don't exist to support their childless parents. They're not there to save the state some elder-care but nor are they there to consume state resources.

You can't have it both ways...

Was ist denn hier los?

This is an appalling proposal.

For a start, "childfree" includes those who are "childless" - not a decision, a sad reality.

Life is already more expensive if you're single, so for single childless people (already paying tax for schools, maternity care, etc) it's even more unfair.

But overall, the idea that paying less tax would make someone decide to have children is awful - anyone who changes their mind for that reason is not going to be a good parent!

If they want to increase the birth rate, they should focus on encouraging those who do want/can have children to have more. Incentives and support so people have a second/third/fourth child.

I think this is a really important consideration.

DP’s parents retired to France with both his sisters. DP has a disability and can’t travel so we’ve never even been over there. We couldn’t even get there if they were dying.

One of the sisters informed DP the other day that they are all financially responsible for any care their parents need in the future, as per French law.

We have two disabled DC and have literally nothing spare. We could provide practical care to his parents if they moved back here but we can’t cover a third of the financial costs for their care if they stay over there.

That leaves DP’s two sisters on the hook for providing for their care financially. I don’t think they were aware of what French law said about this before they all moved.

I think Germany’s proposals may seem anathema to us, but they have to be viewed in the wider context of German law and taxes.

Haven't voted - but this is nothing new, a childless penalty tax has been in existence in Germany since 2005

https://chronicleai.org/article/germanys-childfree-face-higher-costs-for-elder-care-amid-demographic-shift

Trouble is that those pesky women (the right colour sort) don't want to have a Vonn Trapp life, even if they've had one already. Making it financially advantageous for a man adds pressure onto what should only ever be a decision made by the woman.

The fairness of the system seems to be based on the premis that the state pays for the care of the elderly, which doesn't happen in the UK if you own your own home or have £23k ish of savings. I have no objection to people funding their own care bug i think it is hugely unfair that they are expected to subsidise the care costs of social services residents. A home I know charges gee paying residents £1350 per week but council supported residents £900. Same rooms, same service. They are nog alone.

It's neither an incentive to have more children nor a punishment for not having any. It's a proposal to help ease the costs of care for the elderly.

You have to see it within the context of the German system, it doesn't make sense otherwise. Germany still has an incredibly strong sense of family responsibility. Adult children are financially assessed and may have to contribute if a parent needs help with care home fees. There is also, as someone upthread pointed out, still much more intergenerational care and living going on in Germany than in the UK - adult children already provide a lot of care for their parents. People who have not had children cannot benefit from this, but will still need care. There is not enough money to provide for an ever-aging society, so we need to look at ways of raising that money.

It's also really important to remember that it's the children who profit from all the child-related benefits, not the parents - education, child benefits, maternity care etc are essentially all there to support the child. We need children because we, as a society, need people. There is no future anything if there aren't enough adults to support it, and those adults all start off as children.

Having children is both a very personal decision AND a societal one. The argument that some children will go on to become adults who can't or don't work/contribute etc is whataboutism - they are not the norm, and they will need other adults working and contributing to support them too.

So in that case the child-free and child-less should pay the same as those with children, not MORE, which is what is being proposed?!

He might adopt, which hopefully will do one or both of a) help the state care for those children who would remain in foster care instead and b) help him in his old age.

I feel like this is a good thing if it balances so that when there is a very low birth rate, and everyone is paying towards childbirth/childcare/schooling (and that's a small amount) plus a large number of elderly people (and those who don't have children save on the parental costs, don't spend THAT much on society/tax going into children because there aren't that many, so then they can afford to pay more towards elder care).

In the UK we apparently spend £120bn on education and £20bn or so on elderly care - so about six times as much.
In Germany apparently it's €198bn on education and they take in €66bn in elderly care insurance. So that's a much lower ratio - nearer 3x as much.
But if they are having to increase that, I'm assuming it doesn't cover everything they need to spend, even though Google tells me it's ringfenced.

If we had a very high birth rate and a low number of elderly people there would be no point, but it would also be unfair on the working/near retirement group who don't have children - because a lot of their taxes would go on child-related government expenditure AND then they'd pay extra towards elder-related govt. expenditure.

As someone with DCs, you are reducing your potential earnings, and paying to being up those DCs. Right now, through taxes etc. you are supporting the older generation with their pensions and care.

When it comes to you being elderly, your DCs will be contributing via taxes. Not only did you contribute to the older generation, you have enabled (by having and bringing up) the next generation to keep supporting the elders.

Seems fair enough to me.

I'm sure the disparity could be found in many ways and revenue streams, I was more commenting that generally any form of policy around such innate, primordial human experiences that predate any form of governance by millenia, is inherently an uncomfortable topic.

And yes it would add a huge level of hurt to infertile men and women who didn't choose to not have children. My husband and I aren't strangers to infertility. We had our child via. Icsi as conventional ivf wouldn't have worked due to male factor infertility after years of trying for a child, so yes I know it would feel like another form of punishment in a sense. I don't have all the answers.

Fine, so stop any child benefit, UC for having children etc.

Education etc to be provided through taxes because that’s for the children directly, but if parents insist on non-parents paying more for their own care, then surely they understand that non-parents shouldn’t have to subsidise the parents’ costs in bringing up children?

Or we could just leave the UK system as it is currently. Germany seems to have a very different culture and it may well make sense there.

The cause of plummeting birth rates can be seen on these pages every day: too many men are lazy, charmless, feckless arses. Could we tax that maybe?

Controversies like this will probably be left behind by technology.

There may well be AI robot people before long, each one a perfect, hard-working citizen, with no childhood or old age to worry about.

Isn't it obvious? It's homophobic because gay and lesbians couples cant have children naturally, so they're penalised for their sexuality. It's misogynistic because women still do the vast, vast majority of care work (for free), for elderly relatives and children at their own expense. All those absent fathers out there dont have to pay any extra, because they did their two minutes when they got someone pregnant, but a woman who hasn't been able to afford children, who has maybe cared for her own parents saving the government money already, has to pay again.

Or you’ve given birth to people who go through life and constantly claim benefits?! No way of knowing that for sure is there until it’s too late?!

I meant more all those who reluctantly stop at having one child when they'd have preferred two, or stop at two when they'd have been happy with three, because of the financial/childcare pressures. Not encouraging someone who only ever wanted one child to have four!

But it should only ever be presented in terms of support for raising each child, rather than specifically penalising people who don't/can't have any.

Not everyone can have children, not everyone is in a position to have children (they're very expensive for a start!) and not everyone wants one. To be punished for being unable or sensible is proper crap.

Plus, this world has too many people. When do we stop? I hate the idea. Farage is thinking of doing something similar, tax breaks for mums.

This to me is a very rational response to the situation that hasn’t accounted for optics and feelings in the way that we would be more likely to in the Anglo-Saxon sphere.

It’s a bit like the German statutory maternity pay that was brought in when I lived there - you could get up to two-thirds of your net wage up to quite a high limit and the intention was to encourage educated professionals to still give birth, not focus on their careers at the expense of children.

Any discussion in the U.K. of measures to encourage educated professional people to have more children would cause absolute hysteria and no politician would be brave enough to suggest it.

MN is quick to dive on women in threads if they mention having more than 1 child but claim benefits (“why did you have children if you can’t afford them!” Etc.) but on this thread it’s full of people demanding childless/free people pay more tax.

Knowing the Germans, there will be a way that you can prove that you could not rather than did not and as such you wouldn’t have to pay.
I’m tremendously sorry to hear of your experience, sending you the best xxx

Well given AI and the youth employment rates (which are better in Germany than in the UK but still not great) the chances of your offspring being a benefits claimant for at least part of their "working" life is quite high.