More money would be a scandal

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First, there is something to be revealed here: I am an AHV retiree. Any additional support would be most welcome. And now both boards have decided to deny me full living wage compensation: a scandal.

Seriously: Not exactly a scandal, but it would be completely incomprehensible if federal parliamentarians decided otherwise.

Facts: According to the AHV, the Federal Council must adjust pensions “usually every two years, depending on changes in wages and prices.” The calculation basis for this is a mixed index. It corresponds to the average wage and price index.

This is exactly what the Federal Council did at the beginning of 2023: pensioners now receive 2.5% more pension.

Regardless, both councils last year approved Mitte’s party’s proposal to provide full cost-of-living compensation for AHV pensions. That is, not just an increase of 2.5% in the mixed index, but 2.8% in the consumer price index. This will be an additional payment of 7 francs per month to the minimum pension and 14 francs per month to the maximum pension. Or, as SVP adviser Alex Kuprecht put it: “from 25 to 50 centimes a day.”

There’s more to the AHV law: The Federal Council adjusts pensions earlier if inflation rises more than 4 percent during the year. it’s her No. In 2022, it was 2.8 percent. Talking about “historically high inflation” like Christian Lohr is nonsense. Thurgau’s central national council is not young enough to miss out on inflation rates exceeding 5 percent in the early 1990s.

But now to politics, which strangely flourishes, especially in an election year. What happened in September 2022? Haven’t we adjusted the retirement age for women? Wasn’t the financial insolvency of AHV used as the main argument? For women of the transitional generation, an average of 345 million Swiss francs is allocated annually to offset the increase in the retirement age. They are for older women only.

But the 0.3 percent AHV bonus would be worth more than $400 million in total because it would benefit all retirees. The higher their AHV, the higher the bonus. This is called the watering can principle.

‘What are we talking about now? It is about dealing fairly with the loss of purchasing power,” Christian Lohr said during a debate at the National Council. If this were indeed the case, we would have to start with welfare recipients, EL recipients, the working poor, and single parents. Except that they don’t carry the same ballot box weight as retirees. Two weeks ago, GLP National Council member Melanie Mettler said in a Sunday paper: “40 percent of the richest families in Switzerland are retired families.”

Source: Blick