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Comment by JaumeGreen | Hacker News Reader

Deterioration started long before that, according to my sources it started on 2008, but yeah, last 5 years or so it has gone worse. The budget for it has been increasing year by year. It seems that the main problem is not just lack of maintenance but that there's more traffic and new construction.

Pensions is 13%PIB which is on the European median.

The problem is demographic. Also take into account that retired people have paid for their retirement.

Your rhetoric is not what I'd like to be promoted as the first answer entering. Just reading the title of the news I knew what kind of messages I'd see promoted.

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>Also take into account that retired people have paid for their retirement.

No, they have not. It's a pyramid scheme. Whatever they put into the system when they worked probably doesn't even cover 5 years of retirement.

It's a bit more complicated than that. It can be argued that if there is a clear link between contributions and pensions, promised pensions based on past contributions are private property, with the usual protections. I don't know the situation in Spain, but Finland at least has made that choice.

If you choose that (or if your legal system determines that), you need to be proactive with keeping the pension system in balance. While you can change what you promise in exchange for future contributions, substantial changes to what you have already promised can easily require constitutional amendments.

There is no system where you can get more than a share of what the economy produces currently.

Paid contributions should only ensure that you get a part of that, a bit more if you paid more, less if you paid less.

If workforce/economy halves when pensioners double, you will get 4x less than you "expect".

The argument is ultimately constitutional. If pensions based on past contribitions are private property, the government can't avoid paying them when it's no longer economically sustainable. The obligation remains even if the government is no longer capable of honoring it. Political choices and ordinary laws can't change that. The only way out is amending the constitution and socializing the private property.

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