Agreed, outside of union employees (teachers, police, teamsters) what employer is paying into pensions still? Certainly no small businesses are, right? Pensions are largely dead. I don't know the numbers, but small business owners bigger costs are providing healthcare and other benefits, not pensions. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but this person sounds like they're a centrist democrat on both sides of the economic/social divide.

The issue is that internet politics are often viewed from a USA-centric standpoint. When I say l'm neither left nor right (because it depends on the topic, as explained above) see memes like that come up. Although my economically right views for my country would be far left from an US-american standpoint anyway.

(Self-quoting my comment you replied to)

I'm from Austria, we have a functional social system covering healthcare, schools, universities and similar, but due to decades of regulations it is now extremely complicated and needlessly inefficient and therefore expensive (my father is a doctor so I have quite a bit of insight in the inefficient system).

Although, I'm confused what you mean by making a business easier to create,

We have so many regulations for everything, it'd be great if we just were able to create a business online within like a day. Currently we're losing quite a few start up founders to other countries and our economy has entered recession.

and what that has to do with pensions and putting in more than 1/3 of a business' operating budget into pensions. Seems like an unrelated issue.

In our very recent election one of the main points of our strongest left wing party was that they want to further increase the budget for pensions ("if someone has worked their whole life they should be rewarded for it properly" - 60+ is by far the biggest voting group...), and it's pretty obvious that the current system doesn't work (that's why so much of our general budget has to be added every year, and more every year).

Our system works in a way where the working people pay for the people who are currently in retirement and when we are in retirement the new workers will pay for us. This system was established after ww2 when there were few old people and many young ones, so... 5? iirc working people were paying for one in retirement. Currently two are paying for one in retirement, and the trend is heading towards one paying for one in retirement.

We need a rework there to update it for today's societal structure instead of promising people to add even more of the general budget to pensions (...populism to get 60+ people to vote for them).