In a country with orderly finances, a stable tax, financial, and monetary system, the cost of the pension system should not be an 'anchor.' However, in our beloved country, while provincial funds sink into chronic deficits, millions of retirees survive on incomes that border on the undignified. We might then ask if the real crisis is no longer fiscal, but rather 'ethical.' The same speech is repeated by every government: the pension system is unsustainable due to the burden it represents on public accounts. Germany, Spain, and Chile have tried combined models, incentives to extend working lives, and savings systems that balance economic stability with social protection. Today, the discourse itself is immoral. The country truly drags a 'debt' that does not appear on 'fiscal balances': years of delay, years of postponing the discussion, years of not 'pausing the ball' to think about the issue so that future generations do not suffer from it. A country that condemns those who worked their entire lives to live on less than the bare minimum is renouncing its 'social contract,' because reforming the system is not just a technical option, it is also a political obligation. As long as retirees continue to be treated as an expense and 'starving,' often depending on families for help, the status of citizenship will continue to erode in rights, and Argentina will continue to be a country aging in poverty and indifference. It is time to be honest, to stop blaming the past and the present, in order to perceive the real problem we have in every aspect of the discussion. There is time to change, and to put our grandparents (if that's what they are) above calculation, to recognize that old age is not a 'woodworm,' but a legacy. It is true that pensions and retirement benefits constitute a considerable part of national spending, and the outlook is worsened by transfers to deficit provincial funds. What results is a divided, unjust, and economically unviable scheme that sadly warns that the right to dignified old age is in an acute state of affairs for a significant mass of citizens whose subsistence is complicated. We must understand and internalize that a pension is not a subsidy or a gift: it is the fruit of years of work. Every retiree and pensioner is a 'living memory,' and that dignity should not be negotiated; it must be guaranteed, because the true future is not measured in balances, but in the justice with which we honor those who came before us. Meanwhile, other nations have modified their systems to ensure economic sustainability, without the pension being considered an unnecessary expense. To speak of retirees as a 'fiscal cost' is degrading in itself. Those who contributed for years have incomes that are not enough to buy food, medicine, or services; inflation wipes out any increase, and temporary solutions only hide a reality that repeats itself annually. Therefore, the system spends a lot, but protects little. A long-standing claim is that 'provincial funds' in almost all cases show serious inequalities and acute structural deficits, being another black hole. Many have special regimes that produce inequalities in relation to the national system and, at the same time, require transfers from the nation to cover their deficits. However, limiting the debate to an accounting problem is a way of making the human dimension invisible: behind the numbers are millions of individuals who worked their whole lives and who today obtain incomes that do not allow them to cover their basic needs. A great conclusion is that the minimum pension denotes a symbol of poverty. In Argentina, the 'minimum' is significantly below the poverty line. A society that condemns its elderly to poverty is denying its own history and its future, because the right to dignified old age should be the axis of any pension reform (or modernization) that dares to call itself as such. We all recognize that it is an old system and we are also aware that we are immersed in a new, post-pandemic world, that lives in permanent change and with scarcity of all kinds. The Argentine pension system was designed in a context of high formal employment and low life expectancy; decades have passed, today everything has changed: informality is over 35%, life expectancy has almost doubled, and the economy faces cyclical crises.
