Making it on handouts

One of the things that strike you when you start looking into retirement terms and conditions is how different the conditions for retirement are in different countries. If you can not survive on your pension after retirement you have to apply for assistance from the authorities. But the help you get is very different. In the US you get food stamps, which acually is a kind of credit card which can only be used for food. In Japan, you get assistance which depends on your life situation. In Sweden, despite the generous reputation of that country when it comes to social support from the authorities, it is almost a full-time job to get enough to live on. On the other hand, the expectation of Swedish retirees is higher. But in Sweden, like in Germany, people expect to be able to just continue their life style without change when they retire.
That is changing, and the change has been particularly noriceable in Japan. Not because the retirement funding is very generous, rather the reverse. People already had a hard time surviving on their retirement funds, and most people have to have some kind of additional job to get by. When the crisis - what the Japanese call the Lehmann Chock - struck, there were fewer jobs to go around. Not just for retirees. The job listings for foreigners were really sparse for a couple of years, and it did not get better after the great earthquake in 2011.
If you had loans, which many Japanese have, tjings got tough. So tough that there were people who killed thenselves rather than face the shame of not being able to pay back their loans. Actually this happen all the time, but the thing that made these poor people stick out was that they starved themselves to death. Whole families. Consisting of grown-up children and retired parents.
Tragic as it is, it highlights the problem. There has actually been a drastic increase in the number of people who apply to the authorities for economic assistance. In bad times, the authorities need to be much more lenient than in good times. And since the tax revenues fall, but more people need help, the governement needs a reserve. You can not borrow as easily in those bad times either.
As voters, we should probably ask our politicians what they intend to do. How will they save during the next upturn so they can help ordinary people during the next recession? Never mind the banks, many of them deserve to fail and should do so - no matter how painful it may be.
But why should we ask less of our politicians than we ask of ourselves when it comes to the economy? After all, making a household budget is not really more complicated than making a household budget. Sure, there are more zeroes, but at minister level the abstraction level is so high that you would be surprised at how easy it is. The hard part is keeping the budget. It can not be easy when the banks come asking for trillion after trillion. Whatever budget you may have made soon breaks when people do that.
It is then the politicians really have to make the tough choice: give up the money to the banks, or keep for ordinary people? Sure, the banks borrow money - in theory. Ordinary people need support they do not have to pay back.
Or else, beef up the soup kitchens. They will have more work than they can handle.