371–380 of 835 posts
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Who says its not a sustainable system? That is really just a popular assumption. The system is working well at this point with enough headroom. Lobbygroups from the EU and large institutions are pledging for this change. There is not enough workforce according to them. Their profits are endangered. Nobody from those entities are looking at the well being of the citizens.
> Who says its not a sustainable system? The fact that it’s running out of money
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Every single pension system has the working population pay for the retirees. Where do you think the money comes from? Thin air? Any increase in the value of pension funds (for example) is coming from the workers.
China's building massive amounts of underused housing. US boomers could have built long-lived buildings and infrastructure (high-speed trains) which provide usefulness to people later in exchange for them paying some money for retirees. Instead, they built ever-decaying roads and rotting ticky-tacky boxes and left nothing durable for future generations. Hell, they even ripped out trains in cities across the country.…
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> 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…
Such “normalization” would then also, presumably, apply to the rich. Unless one thinks that a billionaire who makes ten million USD a day is ten thousand times more productive than even a very high-earning wage worker.
A wealth tax (instead of income tax) is the best way to reverse the capital hoarding which is destroying modern society. Go after their assets.
https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/education/2021/02/11/le...
What’s more, it led to an exodus of France’s richest. More than 12,000 millionaires left France in 2016, according to research group New World Wealth. In total, they say the country experienced a net outflow of more than 60,000 millionaires between 2000 and 2016. When these people left, France lost not only the revenue generated from the wealth tax, but all the others too, including income tax and VAT.
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Maybe I should not have said efficiently, as it really understates it. It's like if someone gets hired to work full time and then only works 20 minutes per week. Is that person committing fraud or just inefficient? What if the person gives part of their salary to their boss to look the other way? What if the person is a company, their boss is a politician, and the money is given to campaign organisation?
I don't know what case you're alluding to or what program that has such examples. But those examples sound like fraud and corruption.
Honest question: what should the French government do instead? Some people in this thread have said that the government doesn't need to increase the retirement age by 2 years. If that's so, why are they proposing to? Have they done the math incorrectly, are they being needlessly cruel, or ...?
In the US at least, the original retirement age, set in 1935, was 65. The average life expectancy was 60. Today in the US it's 77.8. In France, it's 82. As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with more people who are purely consumers, and contribute nothing to the system. In a post-scarcity world, this would not be a problem, but currently with the oldest generations own…
First of all, you don't freaking need your own new house to start a family. In most countries most people never buy a new house. Second, wealth is not zero-sum, there isn't a magic pot of gold redistributed between people. As value and demand are added to the economy, so is wealth because the new young people with demands can provide skills or time to be used in value creation and then they also (and older folks that…
Having a nation of renters renting from rich old oligarchs is not efficient. some redistribution may be necessary.
Honest question: what should the French government do instead? Some people in this thread have said that the government doesn't need to increase the retirement age by 2 years. If that's so, why are they proposing to? Have they done the math incorrectly, are they being needlessly cruel, or ...?
The french pension reform attempts have been going on for decades . I remember in the mid-90s a huge, weeks- (months-?) long public transit strike which, funnily enough, kick-started Parisian's interest in roller-blading (and led to the awesome weekly Friday-night roller-blading tour [1]. If it's your thing, I highly recommend it! But be prepared to have to go over some cobblestone sections) France's system has the w…
Every single pension system has the working population pay for the retirees. Where do you think the money comes from? Thin air? Any increase in the value of pension funds (for example) is coming from the workers.
One big challenge I see with the whole business about pension reform (and government spending in fact) as a public debate is that two sides are talking on totally different planes. In France, and someday very soon, here in the US. And the public in a certain sense, will problematically have to end up voting a simple yes/no on extremely complex topics which are incentivized to push buttons on single issues. cf. Brexit…
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…
That probably depends on the culture.
My experience from Finland is that there is always a pension reform going on, or at least people are planning the next reform. It's been recognized for decades that the pension system is unsustainable, and reforms have gradually made it more sustainable. Pension growth is now based on a mix of price and wage growth, the initial pension is based on lifetime contributions rather than final wages, retirement age automatically follows changes in life expectancy, and so on.
Older generations certainly got a better deal, and young people are always cynical. But as people age, they tend to gain confidence in the system, as they have seen it change over their careers.