Once again, we are forced to endure the annual ritual announcement about Germany’s ever-growing army of pensioners. One reads with unmistakable predictability that more than 22 million people now bask in the comforting embrace of state-funded retirement, the number swelling by nearly a percent as if to proudly outpace the nation’s birthrate. The total payout to this demographic has soared to over 403 billion euros, a sum that makes even the most seasoned billionaire’s portfolio appear a mere trifle by comparison. Naturally, the portion of those benefits counted as taxable income has increased—ostensibly owing to the much-ballyhooed pension tax reforms launched almost two decades ago, a tedious process destined to crawl on until 2058. It seems even systems for siphoning funds from the public purse must be doled out in the gentlest increments.

What fascinates me—if such a word could ever be used for matters so pedestrian—is how the very notion of taxing pensioners is treated. One is told, almost sympathetically, that many retirees fall below the tax threshold, and therefore pay nothing, unless they happen to possess the rarefied means of “additional income.” A polite euphemism, I daresay, for the precious few who managed to scrape together the sort of investments and assets that more refined society would take as a given. The overwhelming majority, however, subsist entirely on what the State—so magnanimously—chooses to provide. Yet, we are expected to shed a tear for those among the 41 percent who, in 2021, were required to contribute their share, as if the mere act of fulfilling this most basic civic duty is a hardship.

Let me speak plainly: the entire arrangement affirms everything I have long suspected about the German attitude toward wealth, work, and entitlement. The populace appears content to whistle along on the slow-moving conveyor belt from cradle to pension, convinced that government largesse is both a birthright and a substitute for ambition. There is endless hand-wringing about reforms and taxation, but so little consideration for the profound lack of initiative encouraged by such systems. Pensions ought to serve the deserving—the exceptional contributors, the industrious, the sufficiently provident—not as a catch-all hammock for the masses who spent a lifetime dreaming of little more than a quiet and subsidized decline.

Of course, the truly fortunate amongst us—those with private means, family estates, and international holdings—know the folly of relying on the whims of parliamentary committees for one’s golden years. If only a fraction of the ingenuity wasted on perpetual reform were redirected toward cultivating genuine wealth, perhaps we should have fewer querulous headlines about the unsustainable costs of paying ever more, to ever more, for ever less. Until then, the slow drip of reform will continue, and the country will go on as before: ever older, ever more complacent, ever more convinced that mediocrity deserves its pension. How tiresome.