Russian President Vladimir Putin is losing elections.
That’s not a sentence you read very often, but it’s happening. Last week, the candidates of United Russia ceded ground in local, regional, and gubernatorial polls across the country.
I wish I could say that they were losing to democratic reformers, but democratic reformers are not allowed to contest elections in Russia. Genuine opposition parties are closed down, their leaders turned, jailed, or killed. So, voters are turning to the tolerated alternatives, casting protest votes for parties that are every bit as authoritarian as Putin’s but, in other ways, much uglier. The two chief beneficiaries are the Communist Party and the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who muses about rebuilding a Russian empire from Finland to Alaska.
Despots can be genuinely popular and, until now, Putin’s revanchism, which paradoxically mixes a delight in overseas aggression with a sense of wounded victimhood, has won him broad support. So, what changed?
Two words: pension reform. Putin tried to sneak out a hike in the retirement age on the day that Russia won a five-nil victory over Saudi Arabia in the soccer world cup but, as protests mounted, he had to take to the airwaves and announce a partial climbdown: Women would now see their retirement age rise from 55 to 60 rather than 63 (men would still see theirs rise from 60 to 65). But three months on, the anger remains, and, as we all know, seniors vote.
So, let me ask a depressing question. If Vladimir Putin, seen by Russians as a war leader, a man with (before all this) 80 percent approval ratings, an autocrat who is able to close down all but the most fawning media outlets — if such a man is not able to tackle a pensions crisis, what hope have the leaders of multi-party democracies?
Because, believe me, the demographic challenge is more severe in the West. For all our problems, we generally don’t drink ourselves to death in our fifties in grim Siberian mining towns. Rising affluence and advances in medicine are happily lengthening our lives, but also stretching our length of our retirement obligations.
When pensions were first introduced in the United States in the nineteenth century, they mostly started at 65, which became the official retirement age when the Social Security Act was passed in 1935. Life expectancy for the average American at the time was 58. Today, the retirement age is 66, but life expectancy is 79.
Wonderful as this increase is, still greater miracles lie ahead of us. Over the past 20 years, medical science has started to treat old age, not as an inevitable condition characterized by a higher incidence of other diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer, but as a disease in itself. Immense sums are being invested in finding ways to slow cell decay — which is what old age really is. My two-year-old son will probably live past 100, and it is not impossible that he could get closer to 200. Does anyone seriously think he’ll be retiring in his sixties?
Almost every policymaker privately recognizes the magnitude of the challenge. State and federal employees are owed money in retirement that their younger compatriots simply won’t be able to pay. Unfunded pension liabilities in the public sector amount to $4.4 trillion, according to Moody’s — roughly the size of the German economy. Indeed, the gap may be even wider. The American Legislative Exchange Council reckons the pensions deficit to be above $6 trillion. Either way, it has more than tripled over the past decade.
In the states with the worst shortfalls, such as California, service providers have become, in effect, pension providers. The money set aside for firefighters, sanitation workers, and so on is going largely to those who were doing the job 20 years ago, which means there is less to spend on doing it now.
America, in common with most Western countries, has its social security priorities all wrong. The largest sums go to people who are often comfortably well off and are, by the standards of a modern lifespan, in late middle age. In any case, the nature of work for most of us has changed beyond all recognition. Expecting me to type at a screen in my late sixties is very different from expecting my grandfather to work at the shipyards on the Clyde at that age.
So, which elected representative will come out and say such things? Only, as far as I can see, the excellent Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb. And so the deficits continue to mount, and everyone looks awkwardly in the other direction.
Then again, given the Putin example, can you blame them?
