French workers protest plan to increase retirement age • Hacker News Board

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#251

Post by bboygravity » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 10:28 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #241

retinaros wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the system IS sustained. the main white collar one even generates profits. increase the salaries that will increase money being sent to retirement funds and it won’t be a problem anymore. france income per capita has been the same for the past 20 years. they are stealing our wages to make us slaves and they blame us for not working enough. christine lagarde pushed for blocking wage rise in the EU, european commission…

> and in a globalised world where most of the goods are made in countries where salaries are rising as well as inflation, blocking our wages is only sending us to the third world . Just throwing this out here, but in a globalized world, by what mechanism would one expect Europeans and Americans will be able to enjoy a greater standard of living than people in, say, Asia? Are they somehow smarter? More productive? In…

Because the USD is the world reserve currency.

That's why.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#252

Post by supernova87a » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 10:29 PM UTC

ecshafer wrote: post #209

icelancer wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These pensions were bankrupt the minute they were implemented - the capital appreciation rates were completely insane to start, and have only looked worse as time rolls on (which, I have to stress, is extremely tough to imagine). Delusion around pension portfolios eclipses all but the most insane crypto scams. Quite a bit of my university work in the early 2000s revolved around studying and modeling pension-type reti…

Philadelphia's pension "scheme" is crazy and borderline criminal how its implemented. Pay days on retirement date based on salary in the past several years, absolutely rampant overtime fraud, cronyism abound everywhere. There are plenty of stories of people retiring milking tens of thousands of dollars from fraudulent overtime, getting a one time payment on retirement in the hundreds of thousands, and then getting a…

I have heard these schemes and problems being perpetuated by agencies like the police, where they have terminal salary-based retirement benefit plans. (or in the style of, "your last 3 highest paying years") The officers conspire to get the retiring man as many hours as possible in his last years, overtime etc. Or more subtle things like, every road construction site has to have a police officer on duty. It's a bad oversight / policy by the government that allows this to happen. And hard to change politically.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#253

Post by BadCookie » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 10:29 PM UTC

These stats are for the U.S., but one thing that usually get ignored in these retirement discussions is just how massively life expectancy depends on income level and sex: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/health/

Raising the retirement pension age screws over the poor, especially poor men. Perhaps retirement age should be tied to income/wealth somehow ... and maybe even sex (as controversial as I imagine that would be).

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#254

Post by nimbleplum40 » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 10:30 PM UTC

akavi wrote: post #233

throw0101c wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single pension system has the working population pay for the retirees. Nope. At least not completely. Canada switched away from a pure pay-as-you-go (PAYG) system in the 1990s: > Move towards a hybrid structure to take advantage of investment earnings on accumulated assets. Instead of a "pay-as-you-go" structure, the CPP is expected to be 20 per cent funded by 2014, such funding ratio to constantly increase t…

PAYGO vs investment earnings is purely a financial construct. The central issue is that physical goods and services need to be produced around the time that they're consumed, and at a given point in time, an economy has a fixed capacity to generate these goods and services. If you have a non-producing population, and a producing population, then the only way for the non-producing population to consume a given quantit…

Since you said capacity is fixed _at a given point in time_, this is technically true but not really useful.

Populating aging happens over time, not all at once. Overall production also changes over time. It’s not inherently true that for “non-producing” (not sure exactly how you’d define that) people to consume goods the “producing” people must consume less, at least not relative to past levels of consumption.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#255

Post by supernova87a » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 10:30 PM UTC

76384638 wrote: post #248

supernova87a wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you assume that most government programs have on the order of a very few % misspending or outright fraud (which is the case, aside from fiascos like the pandemic stimulus payments) then you just have to assume that the real decisions to be made are the "should we have this program at all" or "do rates need to increase / benefits need to decrease". The auditing and details will get worked out by an existing governm…

There is no reason to believe government programs are ran efficiently or without large amounts of fraud and corruption. There has to be a reason it costs governments (including government contracts) several times as much to do things compared to the private sector and non-profits.

I didn't say efficiently. I said fraud, which is a different thing.

If you want to attack efficiency, you have a lot of work to deeply change how the government, and in fact many aspects of our public / government works. How they use contractors, the kinds of contracts they're allowed to enter into, the reviews and permitting and public commenting they need to engage in, unions, labor rates, etc. That would be as big a challenge as the above debate.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#256

Post by 4gotunameagain » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 10:31 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #241

retinaros wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the system IS sustained. the main white collar one even generates profits. increase the salaries that will increase money being sent to retirement funds and it won’t be a problem anymore. france income per capita has been the same for the past 20 years. they are stealing our wages to make us slaves and they blame us for not working enough. christine lagarde pushed for blocking wage rise in the EU, european commission…

> and in a globalised world where most of the goods are made in countries where salaries are rising as well as inflation, blocking our wages is only sending us to the third world . Just throwing this out here, but in a globalized world, by what mechanism would one expect Europeans and Americans will be able to enjoy a greater standard of living than people in, say, Asia? Are they somehow smarter? More productive? In…

well, we _do_ have a head start and stable (post?)industrial societies with mechanisms already set in place.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#257

Post by ErikVandeWater » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #245

myshpa wrote: post #234

The world needs basic income, with guaranteed housing, internet and food. We have the means to do it. Upto 75% of population is employed in bullshit jobs anyway (= not producing anything, or even being harmful to the society). Only 2% of population working in agriculture already produces food for 10+ billion people, just 8% works in manufacturing (IIRC). Give the basic income population plant-based food (== use just…

> Upto 75% of population is employed in bullshit jobs anyway (= not producing anything). Source? I love that so many people are convinced everyone but them is doing nothing and somehow getting paid for it. > Only 2% of population working in agriculture already produces food for 10+ billion people. What's your point? Who's going to take care of sick people? Who's going to educate our next generation? Who's going to ma…

> I love that so many people are convinced everyone but them is doing nothing and somehow getting paid for it.

That's not the point. The point is what they are producing isn't contributing value to our lives, or actually creating negative value. Building highways looked very productive on paper in the 50's, but now we live in car dependent sprawl, and we continue to pay people to maintain that sprawl when we could have walkable cities that are human friendly.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#258

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #59

MikeTheRocker wrote: post #11

I have no comment on the issue at hand, but I've got to give it to the French for their always impressive level of civil engagement. It feels like Americans are far less willing to take to the streets to support/oppose political causes than they were in times past, and I think that's a shame.

When Americans take to the streets in some states, it's legal to drive through them.

[deleted]

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#259

Post by advisedwang » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

guilhas wrote: post #237

It is strange how a lot of countries claim they will have trouble to pay pensions but at same time are campaigning for UBI

There's a lot of UBI proponents who really just intend it to be a way to strip away current benefits with something that in aggregate provides less. Not all UBIs are the same.

There's a similar situation with the UK's universal credit. On the face of it it was replacing a patchwork of benefits with a single unified benefit, which should be better and more efficient. However the implementation was designed to actually reduce benefits paid out (e.g. they replaced up front payments with payment in arrears, made it difficult to sign on to, kick people off for small issues, etc etc).

Changes labelled with the same name can be radically different in actual results, you really have to look into any given proposal.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#260

Post by maxlamb » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 10:33 PM UTC

andrekandre wrote: post #124

flashfaffe2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French here: Though the problem is well known (at least for 40 years), No french governments has considered diversifying the source of the revenue funding the pension system. Actually its worse as the only capitalisation existing are in a process to be nationalised. Moreover, this reform is purely the outcome of political game. Macron electorat is mainly the 'boomers' who fully beneficiated of th situation ( in fact…

what is the cause of not having enough funds to maintain the current retirement age?

Same reason as most other countries - reversal or population age pyramid because they’re of baby boomers generation being more populous than younger ones. Soon there will be more retired baby boomers than gen X and millennials working so there will be less money going in to pension funds than going out.