To fleece the worker

From those dust, these muds. In 2021, Pedro Sánchez took credit for indexing the annual pension increase to the CPI again. This automatic mechanism had been eliminated in 2013, during Mariano Rajoy's term. The Popular Party replaced the obligation to increase pensions by the same percentage as the official inflation rate with a so-called sustainability factor , updated annually. It was a way to rein in and adjust spending to the economic cycle and the country's overall needs. The PSOE-Podemos government abandoned this tool.

In 2023, there was a second call for reform. The first had increased costs, so it was necessary to introduce elements of financial sustainability to avoid future bankruptcy. The PSOE and Podemos chose the path that is always easiest for a government: draining the pockets of citizens and businesses. The 2023 pension reform decree obtained the support in Congress of deputies from ERC, PDECat, Coalición Canaria, Teruel Existe, Más País, and the Cantabrian regionalists.

Serious pension reform is impossible; at best, tinkering until the collapse

But more than a reform, what was agreed upon was a system of extortion in installments that is only now becoming more concrete. The aim was to ensure an increasing revenue for the government with widespread increases in contributions over a period of just a few years. Every udder wasn't obligated to give more milk. Increases in contributions paid by companies, including those of employees (introducing the intergenerational solidarity contribution paid by employees), and they screw the self-employed until their bones break.

This week, Spain's more than three million self-employed workers learned the amount of contributions the government is proposing for the three-year period 2026-2029. Indignation has ignited so intensely among this group that many of the parties that supported the government in 2023—we assume they had read the text—are now dressing up as mourners to feign support for the person they stabbed not long ago. Who says we can't be at mass and ringing the bells?

The proposed increases over three fiscal years are something of a plunder. To avoid boring you with the tables, three examples suffice. Someone who manages to take home 700 euros will have to pay 265 in contributions. If it's 1,300 euros, the bill is 348 euros, which won't even qualify as a mileurista. For someone who pockets 2,000 euros, the cut is 25%, or 500 euros. It's already clear that at the lower end of the income spectrum, the carnage will be phenomenal.

The reform by José Luis Escrivá, then a minister and now a governor of the Bank of Spain, was nothing more than what it seemed when it was approved: placing the burden of an unsustainable pension system on the heads of an increasingly depleted working class—that is, the majority of the self-employed.

The incentive to work, at the bottom of the income pyramid, disappears. It's better to delve into the administration to get a subsidy. The government has been discouraging work for some time in three different ways: by caricaturing the business community, by presenting work obligations as a sentence to be escaped, and finally, by creating a reality in which it's starting to pay more to feed the pigeons than to go to work.

Escrivá quickly rose from the position of Minister of Social Security to Governor of the Bank of Spain thanks to the partisan institutional colonialism practiced with complete normality in this country. From his current position, he oversees the sustainability reports on the pensions he himself reformed. What is he going to tell us, then? Is he going to change his tune himself? Or is he endorsing studies like the one that claims Spain needs 25 million new immigrants by 2050 (half the current population!) to ensure that retirees can continue collecting their pensions? What kind of reform is that that requires 50% of the population to be imported just to stay afloat?

Let's face it: serious pension reform is actually impossible. Demographic trends will give retirees even greater electoral prominence in the immediate future. So there's no incentive for political parties to undertake it. At best, it's just patchwork and band-aids until the system collapses. The youngest and most precarious among us should prepare ourselves.

Buy yourselves some weight-bearing belts to support all of us who already see a future pension on the horizon. This isn't a country for young people, and even less so for entrepreneurs. The best advice the younger generations can hear is this: take the exam.