The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security Wants Data to Find People! Paying social insurance with loans, teachers using the senior high school entrance exam to scare parents, a one-off catch-up of nine months in October, corporations de-employing while individuals downgrade and stop paying, collecting this year's money at the cost of the tax base for the next three years, the pension surplus peaking in 2028 and bottoming out in 2033, social insurance is an unsecured promissory note written to the next generation!

The host deeply analyzes the Chinese Communist Party's recently promoted "data-driven search for people" and forced social security policies, including extreme phenomena such as taking out loans to pay for social security, schools tying it to the gaokao and middle school exams, and paying a nine-month retroactive difference all at once. The host points out that this will lead to the de-employment of enterprises, individuals downgrading or stopping their payments, and ultimately result in the collapse of the tax base over the next three years, with the cumulative surplus of enterprise pension insurance peaking in 2028 and hitting rock bottom in 2033.

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Fucking hell, the Chinese Communist Party has truly gone so fucking crazy lately; are they almost rounding people up to pay social security? This is simply a grand exhibition of bizarre human behavior! The main targets are flexible employment workers, migrant workers, food delivery drivers, ride-hailing drivers, and people running small independent shops. What the CCP means now is to push these people out of the resident pension insurance, which costs a few hundred yuan a year, and into the employee pension insurance, which costs over a thousand yuan a month. Just a week after the words left their mouths, the entire grassroots level of the CCP has gone into action. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the tax bureau, banks, and even fucking schools and village cadres have been mobilized—truly not a single one is left out. I have gathered everything circulating across the entire internet this week—on X, Facebook, and what hasn't been completely deleted on Weibo—for everyone to see. Once you sort through it, you will know just how furious the Chinese public is about this social security issue. Let's start with the most explosive one: fucking taking out loans to pay for social security. On October 16, an account on NetEase exposed what happened in Jingmen, Hubei.

What happened? The Jingmen Rural Commercial Bank teamed up with the Jingmen Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau to launch two products. One is called Social Security Easy Loan, and the other is Social Security-Bank Loan. They are very considerate, specifically tailored for insured individuals who lack the financial capacity to pay, and the loans are precisely targeted. The money doesn't even pass through your hands; the disbursement goes directly into the social security account. The Party-State has a deficit, but the Party-State is flexible. The CCP understands very well that a deficit won't just disappear, but it can be transferred. As long as my deficit becomes your deficit, doesn't the deficit cease to exist? But the CCP just can't seem to figure out a very simple question: if the credit quality of the entire society declines, the CCP's deficit will end up being much bigger than it is now. Does the CCP understand this simple principle? Of course they do. But now we are seeing these desperate money-grabbing operations, and the meaning is already very clear: if they don't jump in to grab the money now, there will be no tomorrow.

Also unearthed on the same day was a "pension-continuation loan" from Guangxi Swan Rural Commercial Bank, which is quite interesting. You don't have to repay the principal before retirement; after retirement, 65% to 80% of your pension is deducted monthly to repay the loan. The core idea is: take out a loan to pay social security while you're working, and use your pension to pay off the social security loan after you retire, all while paying interest. Let's calculate based on the minimum pension, which is about 1,600 yuan; after the loan deduction, you'd be left with around 700 yuan. Chongqing has also launched a product called "Yu Bao Dai" (Pension Surplus Loan). These contracts all contain a "bottom-line" clause. What kind of clause? It's particularly interesting—or rather, absurd. It states that if the borrower passes away, the money in their personal account and their pension benefits must be used to pay off the loan first. The gold content of Evergrande's leveraged financial magic is still rising; isn't this the same tactic as Evergrande's pre-sale housing? The house is gone, but the mortgage still has to be paid.

What is the CCP's game plan now? It's "pension by debt." Isn't the current approach to mortgage pension rights to the bank? Moreover, this mortgaged equity itself is invalid because once there is a break in payments, the entire pension equity becomes questionable. It amounts to the CCP, in order to get this money, letting the public use a non-existent equity as collateral, and then using the contingent income rights of that collateral as the source of repayment, ultimately binding it to the CCP's own social security credit. The problem is that social security has no credit. This is a classic case of using a semi-crippled collateral to derive credit, and then binding that semi-crippled credit to social security, which in all likelihood won't be able to pay out in the end. As long as one link defaults, the banks, social security, and the participants of these social security loans will all go down together. This structure has a ready-made name: self-guarantee. To put it bluntly, the debtor is using a claim against themselves to collateralize their own debt. In normal bank risk management, this is a zero-value asset, but Chinese banks are now selling it as a product. And it also shows that the lenders already know this collateral is empty.

And all of this requires taking out a loan to pay for social security. First, those who can only pay by taking out a loan are likely to have little to no income; and under such circumstances, to continue taking out loans to pay for it, they are likely not thinking straight. Put these two factors together, and how high do you think the probability of repayment is? Anyway, everyone can judge the credit quality of this product for themselves.

Let's look at what the CCP's "data finding people" looks like in practice. I saw a netizen from Zhejiang post on Xiaohongshu. He is a flexible worker without a steady job, and his employee medical insurance costs about 500 yuan a month. But even for this 500 yuan, he has already stopped paying for over a year. Just last week, he suddenly received a text message asking him to go and complete the registration for basic medical insurance. He replied in the comments: "Guess why I stopped? I have no money." Someone advised him to switch to resident medical insurance, and he said he had been paying that too, at 700 yuan a year. What does this show? It shows that data can find people, but data cannot find money. The Doubao AI account forwarded an even more absurd post: a netizen sent the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security's phrase "find the people" to Doubao and asked what it meant. Doubao replied that this is a typical "pig-butchering" scam and that you have likely encountered fraud. You have to admit, even a brain-dead AI like Doubao can see it, yet normal people can't.

What kind of videos have been circulating the most this week? They are videos of grassroots officials calling people one by one to verify their social security registration, and the responses on the other end of the line are varied. People either hang up immediately thinking it's a scam, or they start cursing—a "fuck your mother" is usually the opening line. A netizen in Tengzhou, Shandong, said that the local neighborhood committee hasn't paid salaries for over ten months, and the neighborhood committee in Jinan hasn't paid for half a year, yet they still have to urge others to pay money. This is particularly surreal.

Now the CCP is not only mobilizing the grassroots to harass you, but also engaging in collective punishment—a tactic aimed directly at destroying one's reputation. The current population of marriageable and childbearing age overlaps significantly with the target group the CCP wants to fleece with social security. Furthermore, the CCP has now linked schooling and the Gaokao to social security. A screenshot is going viral in WeChat Moments and parent groups. A teacher sent out a mass notification telling parents without social security to pay up immediately, otherwise it would affect their children's high school entrance exams and the Gaokao. This is typical collective punishment of the three clans, while simultaneously making children the parents' greatest cost-related weakness. Parents' groups have now caught on, and there are two conclusions: don't lose your job unless necessary, and don't have children unless necessary.

Let us be completely honest. Given the current employment situation, the total number of people in all of China who pay unemployment insurance—meaning those with proper, formal jobs—is only about 250 million. Now, with around 12 million college graduates every year, combined with such high youth unemployment, and on top of that, the Chinese Communist Party imposing this kind of massive binding enforcement, what is the result? The result is that the population of childbearing age is even less willing to get married and even less willing to have children. Furthermore, is failing to pay social security a matter of simply not wanting to pay? No, it is because people have no money, no jobs, and no ability to pay. Therefore, my very first reaction upon seeing this was that while boosting the birth rate is already as difficult as ascending to heaven, now things are even worse: the CCP continues to add costs to the childbirth side, so who the hell would want to have children anymore!

What is the most absurd part? The CCP is once again using its old trick of applying new rules retroactively, forcing people to make a lump-sum payment for nine months of social security price differences back in October. What does that mean? It means haven't the social security contribution bases gone up across the country this year? And they were only announced successively between July and September of this year. But where does the enforceable date start? It says January 1st of this year. If flexible employment workers pay out of their own pockets all the way to October, they also have to make up the so-called difference for January through September in one lump sum.

Let us look at the destructive power of this retroactive payment. Starting in October, the monthly social security fee in Foshan rose from 1,528 yuan to 1,707 yuan, and on top of that, people have to pay the difference for January through September. In Shenzhen, the monthly payment skyrocketed all the way from 1,389 yuan to 1,600 yuan, and just making up the difference alone costs 1,589 yuan. Anhui started charging 940 yuan this month, whereas it used to be just over 600. Shandong is even more outrageous. Take Jiaozhou as an example: the minimum wage there is only 2,000 yuan, but flexible employment social security costs over 1,000 yuan a month. The brother who talked about this matter said that he himself had his payments interrupted for several years, and most of the people around him who also had interruptions were middle-aged, with the primary reason being that they lost their jobs and had no money to pay.

Look at how lively this past week has been, right? The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security sets the tone, the tax bureau hangs up penalty notices, the court's judicial interpretation is back on the trending searches, banks are rolling out loan products, schools are using the senior high school and college entrance exams to pressure parents, and communities and villages are making phone calls, sending text messages, and doing door-to-door visits one by one. Amidst all this, there is one more thing everyone needs to pay attention to: the annual notice regarding the adjustment of retirees' pensions. I have discussed the rhythm of this matter with everyone before, so let us review this frequency again: the notice on pension adjustments was issued in April in 2021, in May in 2022, also in May in 2023, in June in 2024, and last year it was issued in July. This year, up to October 20 of the date I am recording this episode, the websites of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the Ministry of Finance are still completely empty, just a blank sheet of paper. In other words, right now in China, while every machine is running at full throttle to collect money, on the payment side, they do not even dare to say whether pensions will go up or not.

Now let us examine how the pension system—where people depending on current contributions support current retirees—has ended up depleted, and exactly what stage it has reached. I will put my conclusion right here: according to my calculations, this round of ruthless collection will only bring in this year's money, but it will destroy the tax base for the next three years. The cumulative surplus of enterprise employee pensions will peak in 2028 and hit rock bottom in 2033. Let us calculate and we will know. The nominal enterprise contribution rate for the five major social insurances combined is about 25%. So how much was actually paid? I reverse-calculated this using the Ministry of Finance's final accounts: the premiums collected for enterprise employee basic old-age insurance amounted to 4.59 trillion yuan. Dividing that by the 290 million to 350 million actual contributors, and then dividing by the 24% nominal contribution rate, the current average contribution base is between 4,550 yuan and 5,490 yuan per month. Meanwhile, the CCP itself claims that the monthly average wage in private units is 5,966 yuan, and in non-private units, it is 10,787 yuan. After a weighted average, the all-caliber average wage is around 90,000 yuan a year, with the contribution base accounting for 60% to 73% of the actual wage. This is the result calculated using the CCP's own average wages. Why calculate this?

It is to see what kind of contribution base the CCP wants and considers ideal. Under the current circumstances, combined with the CCP's perspective, how would the CCP itself view this? The CCP would think that the social security money enterprises are actually paying right now is only a little more than half of what they ought to pay. Based on the intermediate scenario I adopted, what enterprises actually pay right now is only equivalent to 13% of wages, but the CCP wants them to pay 25%. As long as this missing 12 percentage point gap is made up, the total cost for an enterprise to support one person will increase by 10.6%. If housing provident funds are also paid based on actual wages, then the cost for one person will increase by 18.6%.

What does a 10% increase in labor costs actually mean? Let us take the catering industry as an example. An annual report by the China Hotel Association last year showed that labor costs for catering enterprises account for about 22.2% of operating revenue, while the average net profit margin is only 0.3%. I will relax this to 1.5% to calculate a median store that is still surviving. With labor costs rising by 10.6% multiplied by the 22.2% labor share, this equals 2.36% of operating revenue. The profit margin of this store would plummet from 1.5% directly to negative 0.86%, and this is just the extra money to be paid every month moving forward. What is even more ruthless is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is also demanding retroactive payments. Under the baseline scenario of retroactive collection for two years, the unpaid amount plus an annualized late fee of 18.25% would amount to 5.6% of annual operating revenue.

As early as February 2020, Tsinghua University and Peking University jointly surveyed 995 small and medium-sized enterprises and found what problem? 85% of enterprises could not survive on cash for even three months, and the situation is even more fragile now than during the Wuhan pneumonia period. In the second quarter of this year, Peking University conducted another micro-enterprise survey, showing that the cash flow of these enterprises can only sustain an average of 2.8 months. This figure has been hovering between 2.4 and 2.9 months since 2022, while the net profit margin has now dropped to 4.4%, and operating revenue has dropped by another 23% year-on-year. If converted to covering all costs, the cash of a median enterprise can last for one month. If the 5.6% retroactive payment is divided into 12 installments, it would be 0.47% per month. Adding the monthly loss of 0.07%, that makes 8% divided by 0.54%, meaning this restaurant can only hold out for 15 months.
In the manufacturing sector, the labor share is 18% and the profit margin is 3.5%. Manufacturing can hold out for 21 months, construction labor for 13 months, and logistics and express delivery for 10 months. In short, regarding the current social security agency of the CCP, the money to be paid moving forward is killing profits, while the money demanded retroactively is killing cash flow. Therefore, the coming months are not the end for enterprises; they are the countdown to dying unless adjustments are made, and enterprises will definitely adjust their strategies.

Where will they adjust? The identity equation can provide the answer. If your labor cost rises by 10%, and total labor cost is required to remain unchanged, the headcount must be multiplied by ten elevenths, which means laying off 9.1% of employees or cutting everyone's salary by 9.1%. There is no third number. Empirical research from China itself is even more ruthless, stating what? For every 1% increase in per capita social security contributions, the enterprise's labor demand will drop by 0.18%. According to the middle scenario I adopted—meaning enterprises currently actually pay just over half of what the CCP thinks they should pay—once fully paid, social security contributions themselves will rise by 92%, almost doubling. Following closely, labor demand will drop by 16.6%. What its calculation measures is not that enterprises hire fewer people, but that enterprises completely switch people from regular employees to non-employees. The most common method in the past was to report the base amount based on a fixed salary, while bonuses and subsidies were excluded. This can no longer be done because now, when the CCP compares individual income tax with social security on a monthly basis, the deception is exposed. Therefore, this path is blocked. Some people also turn employees into individual industrial and commercial households. After September last year, what did the CCP's courts look at? They looked at whether the employer actually managed the person; if they manage the person, it counts as an employment relationship. Therefore, if they do not manage the person, the path of direct project outsourcing remains viable. This is the path of de-employment. Therefore, the next move for enterprises will be to truly outsource a business unit along with its personnel and management, and in extreme cases, simply stop operating altogether. The method will most likely be scheduling a full-time employee as a part-time employee, or directly rehiring people who have already started collecting pensions. What do these paths have in common? They dismantle employment relationships into something that does not constitute an employment relationship. The rational reaction of enterprises will definitely not be underpaying, but de-employment. These people are not statistically unemployed, but they vanish from social security records.

Let's look at individuals. For those employed by a company, it goes without saying: you only pay 8% of your salary for social security, while the enterprise pays 16% for you. The ones who really need to do the math are the flexible employees; they have to pay the full 20% themselves. What is the minimum tier? The contribution base stipulated by various regions cannot be lower than 60% of the local average wage; paying based on that 60% is the minimum tier. Let's calculate: suppose a person starts paying this minimum tier at age 43 and continues until age 63, starting at 900 yuan a month, and it has to increase every year along with the average wage. Over 20 years, you will have paid in at least 290,000 yuan. In the first year of retirement, you receive 3,208 yuan per month, and you won't break even on your principal until you are 71. If you live to 79, this 290,000 yuan is equivalent to an annual interest rate of only 5.2%. This is a conditional interest rate—you only get this interest if you live that long, and it also depends on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can survive until then. It looks like it's not low, but the problem is that by the time you collect the money, it will be after 2045. By my calculation, the pool will have been empty long before then. Suppose the CCP acts like a rogue and cuts the pension fund by 25%; then the annualized interest rate drops to 3.6%. What kind of level is this? The current 30-year treasury bond yield of the CCP is 2.2%, and even insurance companies' dividend-paying annuities only offer 2% to 2.5%. Employee pension insurance is just one or two percentage points higher than those two. What is this premium? It is exchanged for the risk that you might not be able to collect the money in the future. Those under 35 shouldn't even think about it; collecting money is a matter for after 2050. The minimum contribution period will also increase by half a year every year starting from 2030, until it reaches 20 years. What will the pension situation be like in 2060? It will be roughly one active worker supporting one retiree; by then, there will be more people collecting money than paying into it. Under the CCP's existing fiscal system, this is impossible to manage. Now, the CCP is also trying its best to push toward that worst-case scenario.

If enterprises start to de-employ, and individuals lower their contribution tiers or drop out entirely, if you combine these factors, it is a nightmare for the CCP's policy side. It can be said that this is the chart the CCP fears most regarding the collection of social security. I treat this round of aggressive collection by the CCP as an effective jump in tax rates. What do I use it for? I plug it into a dynamic Laffer curve for estimation. Taking last year's enterprise employee pension insurance collection of approximately 4.89 trillion as the base period, if there is no additional levy, it would trend upward by 3.5% annually. Where does the 3.5% come from? In this year's Ministry of Finance budget table, the total social security premium revenue only grew by 3%. What is the wage growth rate provided by the National Bureau of Statistics? 3% for the private sector and 4.3% for the non-private sector. If we don't mess with our two collection revenue streams, it will grow by at most around 3.5% a year. Moreover, there is a high probability that this data is fucking fake. But it doesn't matter; let's calculate based on the most optimistic scenario provided by the CCP. The baseline scenario is that the effective collection intensity increases by 15% in the first year; at this time, the books can collect an extra 730 billion. Once the 15 months of the second year pass, enterprises will start clearing out, employment will become informal, and flexible employment will start to stop paying; these three channels will start biting into the tax base simultaneously. According to elasticity estimates, the increment will drop to 320 billion, by the third year the increment will be negative 105 billion, and by the fourth year, it will be 400 billion less than if there were no additional levy. The CCP is effectively digging the gap twice as deep with its own hands; that is to say, the harder the additional levy, the bigger the pit will be after four years, which directly leads to getting even less in hand. And after an enterprise is deregistered, it won't be resurrected. By then, even if the CCP lets these enterprises resurrect to pursue back payments, first, the cost of collection will rise, and second, the money that can be recovered won't be much. Plus, if people are all replaced by outsourcing, they can't be brought back. Therefore, after the fourth year, this curve doesn't bounce back; it accelerates downward at a lower point. The CCP has already seen this curve once in 2018, and it was so scared that it hurriedly lowered rates and made promises in 2019. So why won't the CCP back down in 2026? Because the CCP's current fiscal situation has absolutely no way out. So for the CCP, under the current conditions, its optimal solution is not to refrain from additional levies, but to take the peak of the first year in one go, and then leave the collapse of the following three years for the future.

When will that pool hit rock bottom? Samuelson, the old master, studied this thoroughly. Back in 1958, the pension system he researched was one where money isn't saved up but collected and immediately paid out. Why on earth could it offer returns to people? Ah, that is the exact question. In 1960, economist Allen went on to calculate when this kind of system would be more cost-effective compared to saving money for retirement yourself. The two arrived at the same conclusion: what is the essence of money collected currently being paid directly to those currently retiring? It is a question of what the implied rate of return obtained by the insured participants is equal to. It equals the growth rate of the insured population plus the wage growth rate. What is this thing called? It is called the biological interest rate. Let us look at China's current situation. First, let's strip away the flexible workers and farmers who were forcefully pulled into the system in recent years; the number of people actually paying in is decreasing by about 1 percent year after year. Let's look at the data: last year's birth population was only 7.92 million, the death population was 11.31 million, and the total population decreased by 3.39 million. The private sector wage growth data is 3 percent, while the non-private CCP sector data is 4.3 percent. Thus, the biological interest rate is nominally only 2 percent to 3 percent, but on the other end, what the pool promises to give people is far more than this. Let's calculate: a person paying in at the lowest tier pays a total of 290,000, and after retirement, they collect 3,200 per month, which increases year by year. As mentioned before, this equates to giving them an annual interest of 4 percent to 5 percent. How does this money keep increasing the more it is paid out? The retirees' pensions must rise by 2 percent to 3 percent every year, while the wage base of newly retiring people is already high, so what they collect is more than older people. Furthermore, the number of people collecting money is increasing by 3.2 percent year after year. All three factors push upward together. Let's use data to speak: in 2024, the money paid out by enterprise employee pension insurance was 7.2 percent higher than in 2023; in 2025, the money paid out by social security was 6.3 percent higher than in 2024; and the Ministry of Finance's expenditure budget for 2026 raised it by another 6 percent. In the first half of the year, 4.14 trillion was actually paid out, which was 6.4 percent higher than the 3.89 trillion of the same period last year. Meanwhile, the premiums collected only increased by 3.3 percent in 2025, and the 2026 budget only increased by 3 percent. To put it bluntly, the money in the pool can only grow by 2 percent to 3 percent a year, but it has to pay out 6 percent to 7 percent more each year. The result is that the coverage of contributions to expenditures drops at a rate of 4 percentage points every year. In 2024, the contributions for enterprise employee pensions were only enough to cover 92 percent of expenditures, and this year it will only be around 84 percent. Isn't Samuelson's model accurate? It matches perfectly with the growth rate of the contributing population and the wage growth rate, and through back-calculation, another problem is found: the CCP's wage growth rate is still lower than 3 percent, likely only around 1.5 percent to 2 percent. This is even without factoring in unemployment. Everyone can plug this in and calculate it themselves; isn't this the current reality of China's social security?

In this year's budget report, the overall social security expenditure deficit reached 2.42 trillion, expanding by 20 percent in a single year. From full to empty, I divide this system into four stages. In fact, each stage is forced out because the previous one could no longer hold up. What was it at the beginning? Eating the demographic dividend: more people paying in, fewer people collecting, and the surplus was saved up. When the people paying in could no longer keep pace with those collecting, the collections were not enough for payouts, and the deficit had to be filled by fiscal subsidies and surplus interest. Although the book surplus was still rising, it could only keep rising by relying on fiscal blood transfusions. China's current situation is right at the tail end of this stage. When subsidies and tightened collections can no longer fill the gap, the surplus principal must be used. This stage is called living off past reserves. To live off past reserves, only four things can be done: raising the contribution base, delaying retirement, increasing the years of contribution, and taking this surplus to gamble in the stock market. All four of these things have been fully utilized from 2024 to 2026, even earlier than the numbers on the books suggest. What does this indicate? It shows that the internal accounts seen by the CCP are even fucking uglier than the public final accounts. Panic after the reserves are eaten away will be followed by the moment this pool hits rock bottom. What is it like after the pool hits rock bottom? It means what is collected is completely insufficient for payouts, and what happens when you cannot collect enough? You stall, you cut, you print money. Northeast China is a perfect model. Jilin's collections the year before last were 60.5 billion, while pension expenditures were around 125.5 billion. The finance department had to subsidize 41.6 billion, and national pooling had to allocate another 49.5 billion. In other words, the money poured in from the outside was 1.5 times what it collected itself. Out of the national cross-province reallocation of 254.6 billion, Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning took away 80 percent. The only reason the Northeast hasn't hit rock bottom is what? It's because the national pooling gave Guangdong's surplus to the Northeast.

If we extrapolate based on the equations of motion, I originally calculated that it would peak in 2029 and be exhausted by 2036. This calculation, however, is actually too polite in two respects. What is the first one? I assumed that the fiscal subsidies in this model could still increase by 5% each year, but the CCP's current fiscal debt capacity has reached its limit; even borrowing new debt to pay off the old is barely possible. From now on, subsidies will at best be frozen at this year's level. It is a simple question: social security subsidies alone already account for 60% of the central government's fiscal expenditure. The other thing is that the CCP is now treating this round of aggressive collection as a one-time tool, because once a company is deregistered, it will not come back to life; those who stop paying will not return; and once confidence is shattered, it will not rise back up. Collecting only an extra 500 billion or so over four years comes at the cost of collecting less every year thereafter. If you factor these two points in, the collection will surge in the first year, collapse in the following three years, and then crawl along at 1%. After that, subsidies will be frozen, while expenditures will continue to rise at a growth rate of 7.5%. Under these circumstances, the surplus will peak in 2028 and hit rock bottom by 2033. If you remove the subsidies for this stress test, it will be completely empty by 2031 or 2032. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences report last year said that expenditures would not exceed revenues until 2036, but that was based on high-growth projections for both collections and subsidies. However, the reality is that the notice for pension increases is coming later every year; this year, the notice hasn't even been issued yet. This calendar itself is a high-frequency indicator of the fiscal capacity to pour money into the pool. Therefore, regarding all the commotion stirred up by the CCP's grassroots level this week, the question to ask is not how much can be collected, but from whom it is collected, and how much of the tax base will remain after the collection. What the CCP wants is to collect the peak amount for the current year at once, while the rational response of enterprises is to de-employ, and the rational response of individuals is to downgrade or keep only the basic resident pension insurance. The rational superposition of these three parties is the collapse of the tax base in the next three years; the pool will start leaking in 2028 and will be drained by 2033. This is not a question of who is ruthless or not; it is the algebraic result of a pay-as-you-go system after the contributing population has entered negative growth.

So I don't advise anyone to pay into this fucking thing; I advise everyone not to pay. Whether this pool can survive until 2035 is a struggle. Advising people to pay into it is advising them to jump into a fire pit, let alone taking out a loan to jump into it. Just remember one thing: social security is not savings. What is the essence of the CCP's social security now? It is an unsecured promissory note issued to the next generation of contributors. And the number of people in the next generation is already written in last year's birth figure of 7.92 million. Seriously, coming back to it, you have to live to be 79 years old to get that contingent 5.2% interest. That is to say, it is demanding your lifespan, while at the same time you have to honestly pay out your current cash flow, and you have to endure the risks of the CCP being gone by then and the social security system exploding. With so many additional conditions and such great risks to get this 5.2% interest—you can get 5.2% on US Treasury bonds right now, and it doesn't have any prerequisites. I think there is no need to judge how to choose, right? So for those who want to save for retirement now, just do one thing: look up guides on how to buy US Treasury bonds. You don't need to buy a lot every month, just invest a little regularly; it's that simple.