Premier De Croo komt met eigen en zeer ‘blauw’ pensioenplan: minstens 30 jaar werken, hogere taksen en weg met gunstregimes ambtenaren

17 comments

  1. Didn’t expect this to hit. Finally some movement to get pensions affordable.

    Luckily they seem to understand that it’s the pensioners that will start to significantly chip in.

    Longer work.

    Lower pensions.

    More taxes on secondary forms of pension.

    Etc.

    I would add a higher death tax.

    Edit: and rightly so. Most wealth is concentrated in the elder population. It would be a crime to squeeze the youth, while the old live in luxury.

  2. lol if they attack civil servants even more i might even go back to private and sell my knowledge to cheat the belgian state even more.

  3. Doesn’t he have a vote of no-confidence to survive next week? I’m pretty sure that promoting a pension plan the socialists will never agree to isn’t going to help his case.

  4. Worried about my civil servant pension. I’m a low level civil servant, since 16 years, and my pay is quite low compared to others with the same experience. The higher pension is something that would compensate a bit for this.
    I understand that the many high level civil servant pensions cost too much but now the ‘little shrimps’ like myself will bear the brunt.

  5. Ah yes, a typical VLD solution, first give larger pensions to self-employed people without increasing their contribution significantly, and then go and grab the money elsewhere to balance the books in the short term without considering the socioeconomic impacts beyond the current government’s time in office:

    * The amount of folks investing money under the form of “pensioensparen” will start dropping like a brick, increasing the need for social security support in the future most likely.
    * This money for pensioensparen is definitely not used by certain funds to provide the majority of their investment money, this might have a *great* impact on the stability of certain financial markets. /s
    * Ambtenaren jobs generally don’t offer that competitive of a salary compared to industry, this was traditionally offset by other benefits (e.g., pension being roughly your salary from before you retired for the lower levels).
    * A large amount of ambtenaren their financial planning was entirely based on this advantage existing, meaning if you start cutting in it now you’ll put a lot of folks into a world of pain and misery. For example, I know several in my family had their mortgage running into their retirement because their pension was sufficiently large to cover it.
    * The number of ambtenaren is steadily decreasing, since a lot of folks are hired under other contracts, or the work is outsourced. (hello management overhead!) So the income from ambtenaren will drop off quite quickly at some point, while it’s quite likely that the cost will not flatten off as quickly given population demographics.

    Of course, you could just make it so that self-employed people have to make themselves a proper employee and pay the same taxes as for a regular employee to cover their pensions and other social benefits, but that’d be far too practical of a solution I suppose? And yes, I am well aware that would kill some small business and make some ventures uneconomical as primary profession. But I’m not quite sure the rest of society should cover that one.

  6. Well, looks like I’ll be doing the absolutely bare minimum at work. Or less, if i can get away with it.

    I’ll play the monkey, if all you want to spend are peanuts.

  7. If we would express the work-time (years) in percentages of the average lifetime in stead of nominal amount of years. This would not be an issue and would shift along with the reality.
    With an average of 82 years alive of which you go to school till let’s say 21 and retire at let’s say 65. That leaves aprox. half a lifetime living on the system. Its a miracle to fund that with only 50pct taxes.

  10. The only good thing here is about the ambtenaren pensioen. There is no reason that those should be higher than in the prive.

    In the end, those are mainly beign paid by the prive sector… which is nuts if you think about.

  11. If it was possible I would just want state pensions to be abolished completely, but this is a step in the right direction at least

  15. Instead of making assumptions about who is better off, let’s just make all income taxable in the same way and tax it progressively. If anyone actually *is* much better off, then it’ll be evened out by the taxation taxing high income pensioners more.

  16. What a load of bullocks. If you think self employed people are that better of. What’s stopping you to become one.

  17. I wonder why we don’t have 401k like tax advantaged investment accounts in Belgium (but I am not very knowledgeable on the matter) wouldn’t it incentivize people to build more pension savings themselves ?

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