The Merz government is preparing a reform of the Pflegeversicherung — compulsory insurance for the care of the elderly — which provides higher contributions for those without children and progressively lower contributions for those with one, two, three. A differentiation that does not arise from a political whim, but from a ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court of 2022, which established that ignoring the contribution of those who raise the future generation is a distortion that the law cannot tolerate indefinitely. There is a logic in this approach that deserves to be taken seriously, especially in Italy, where the problem exists in an even more acute form.
European social security and healthcare systems are based on an implicit pact between generations: those who work today finance the pensions and care of those who are elderly today, in the trust that tomorrow there will be someone to do the same for them. It works as long as the population pyramid holds. That pyramid, throughout Europe and in Italy more than anywhere else, has been overturned. In 2024, 355,000 children were born — 3.9% less than the previous year — compared to 652,000 deaths.
In this context, those who bring children into the world and educate them are not making a private choice. It is producing a collective good: future taxpayers who will one day fund everyone’s pensions and healthcare — not just their parents. Yet in our tax system this contribution is almost completely invisible.
Raising a child today means giving up income, careers and free time. It means spending considerable sums to educate and train him. Those who make these choices are investing in the human capital that will keep the system afloat for everyone tomorrow. Those who do not have children, with the same income, on average it has greater resources and contributes to the system in an equal amountwithout having supported the cost of that future workforce on which the system depends.
There is a phrase that those who have children hear said, sometimes with a shrug of the shoulders, by those who don’t have any: “You wanted a bicycle, now ride. Nobody forced you.” And it’s true — no one forces anyone. Children are made out of love, out of choice, out of beauty. Not out of obligation and not for economic convenience, much less for fascist legacies of a past time…
But that sentence contains a false premise: that is, that it is a private matter, which concerns only those who have chosen to become parents. It’s not like that. Those children will grow up, work, pay the taxes and contributions that will finance everyone’s pension, welfare and healthcare — even of those who look at them with disdain today. The social security system is not a family affair: it is a collective agreement, and is supported by someone’s children.
So, for the sake of consistency, those who use that argument should be willing to accept the consequences fully: if you didn’t want the bicycle, then walk — without a pension financed by other people’s children, without a health system made possible by the contributions of future generations. Nobody says this, of course, because it would be wrong, cruel and impractical. But it should at least make us reflect on how unfair it is to pass on to parents the cost of a good – the continuity of welfare – that everyone enjoys.
The issue is not a war between those who have children and those who don’t. Those who don’t have children today have every interest in someone else having them. The birth rate is not a family problem: it is a collective problem.
If those who raise the future generation today bear a real cost in everyone’s interest, it is right that the system recognizes it – not as a bonus to the birth rate, but as a correction of a concrete asymmetry. The German reform is not perfect, of course, but iThe underlying principle is difficult to dispute. Italy, which is structurally behind for decades on this front, would do well to think about it seriously.
