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French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

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Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#391

Post by anon84873628 »

oblio wrote: post #322
Spooky23 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a pretty crazy position. In the US, there’s lots of material out there on the conditions that led to the creation of Social Security and subsequent legislation like Medicare and Medicaid. Hopefully you are simply ignorant of that history and not demonstrating a blase tolerance of human suffering. These systems are very sustainable, and the solution to the funding issues would be best served by indexing the cut…

I assume you're a software developer in the US. Doesn't your awesome insurance mean that you are out of pocket just a few thousand dollars?

Even if so, that money was paid by the premiums of all the other people in the plan. The point is that having children is simply too expensive, partly due to cost disease in healthcare.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#392

Post by thaumasiotes »

bobthepanda wrote: post #309
notch898a wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I figured the one upside of retirement was it was a baseline for the poor. If it screws them over too I think it should just be eliminated all together and return the tax to the worker to save/invest on their own.

The origin of the modern pension system in Prussia was not actually designed to let people retire; the age was initially pegged to 70, the life expectancy of Prussians in 1881. American Social Security had an age of 65, but at the time of its passing life expectancy for American men was 58.

> The origin of the modern pension system in Prussia was not actually designed to let people retire; the age was initially pegged to 70, the life expectancy of Prussians in 1881.

As you can already read sidethread, a life expectancy of 70 means huge majorities of people living well past 70. Every baby who dies at the age of 8 months means half a dozen people die in their 80s. (Or, you know, several dozen people die in their 70s.)

Even if lifespans weren't skewed low, which they are, 50% of all people would live beyond the life expectancy at birth.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#393

Post by ars »

Convolutional wrote: post #192
supernova87a wrote: post #156

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…

The US has spent $100 billion in the Ukraine over the past year, with more on the way, it is sending billions a year to Israel and Egypt, is involved in Iran, China, Venezuela etc. It just stopped spending a ton in Afghanistan. All the money spent there seemed to have no positive effect. The US seems to have money to throw all over the world for this kind of bloodthirsty waste, if it cuts it can cut there. People get…

You call them wars of choice. It would be more correct to call this preventative money.

They spend this money in order to prevent having an actual war later.

Also a lot of the aid is actually jobs program where the aid recipient is required to spend the money on American made goods.

So it's not quite as simplistic as you're making it out to be.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#394

Post by PeterisP »

luckylion wrote: post #293
konschubert wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the finer point that GP made: At the end of the day, somebody has to change that bedsheet. Consider this extreme edge case: If everybody is retired and no is is working, inflation goes to infinity and all those savings and stocks become worthless.

For sure, but there's a difference between a promise that someone will do it for you, and you having currency to exchange for doing so. In the "having money" case, you have more options, but if you're given options, you also have more opportunity to make terrible decisions. And if it's a lump sum (or private investment of some kind), you can pass it on to your children - you can't do that with pensions in the other t…

What is currency if not an implied promise that someone will provide future services or goods in exchange for it? In a situation where workers can't/won't keep a promise to maintain retirees, the currency value will reflect exactly that, it will devalue so that the total amount of currency retirees have won't be enough to buy these services.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#395

Post by seydor »

It s very hard for these reforms to pass in europe, to the point where it might be better to just let the pension systems collapse.

Raising the retirement age is not a great strategy, 70 yo people are not as productive and hoard jobs thus increasing unemployment of the most productive, the young. This is massively happening in all of southern europe and is a major reason for economic retardation.

Young people are increasingly aware that they will not get pensions. Old people hold vast amount of wealth in real estate which has become entirely unaffordable even to well-earning young professionals. At some point the collapse of pension funds will meet the need for housing. Hopefully there will be a tradeoff

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#396

Post by dangus »

supernova87a wrote: post #231
dangus wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have some kind of similar study that doesn't come out of the Republican Party? Maybe something a little more non-partisan? An example of the flaws of this argument/article is how Social Security is self-funded, and not in any financial jeopardy on its own. [1] Some of the other entitlement programs on the list also work that way. Regardless, my understanding is that a government's budget never has to be balanc…

> " Do you have some kind of similar study that doesn't come out of the Republican Party? Maybe something a little more non-partisan ?" Not sure what your point is. I'm not sharing the article/infographic and animated budget scenarios as "this is what needs to happen" from some party's perspective. The point is a graphical display of the size of different buckets (which I take as fact) and the sliders that you can pl…

Sure, the basic data about government spending is real but in this particular article it’s being leveraged for a distorted narrative, and the distortion is the idea that there’s no possible way we can pay for these things without fucking over the common person.

The infographic sliders are reinforcing the idea that “the money must come from one of these things” when it really should just come from progressive taxation at a reasonable rate instead of letting the wealthy off easy.

The Republican Party cut the taxes of the wealthy in 2017 and increased the deficit by doing so. They can’t be trusted to give advice about government spending because their basic party platform is that government is bad, the wealthy need tax relief, and their actual legislative track record is increasing the deficit. And yet here they are telling us through their study and this complimentary article that the only way to cut the deficit is to fuck the poor and the elderly.

https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571754894/charts-see-how-much...

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#397

Post by Manuel_D »

supernova87a wrote: post #349
gymbeaux wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at the same time I don’t want to be forced into paying say $1M into social security and only live to see $200k come back to me

I thought the idea of Social Security was an insurance program to guard against you outliving your means if you live long enough, not an I-get-paid-back cash-out of your payments. Aren't you having a fundamental misunderstanding about what the purpose of SS is? And not sure if you know, but the dollar figures are more like: Max pay into the program: ~$300k over your 40 year working life (if you maxed out the contribu…

> I thought the idea of Social Security was an insurance program to guard against you outliving your means if you live long enough, not an I-get-paid-back cash-out of your payments. Is that a fundamental misunderstanding about what the purpose of SS is?

Yes, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of social security. Social security isn't insurance or an investment, it's a tax that's presented as an insurance or investment in order to make it more palatable. The social security tax rates were set with the demographics and life expectancies in mind decades ago. And now that these demographics and life expectancies have changed we'll either have to drastically increase the tax workers are paying, or drastically cut the amount that people withdraw.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#398

Post by legitster »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #303
legitster wrote: post #82

My grandfather a few years back passed a rather profound point in his life - he had been retired so long that he officially spent less of his life not working than working (despite entering the workforce at 15). And it's not lost on me I am essentially doing double work: it's not enough for me to generate enough economic value for myself, society kind of depends on me to generate enough surplus value to cover an enti…

How old is your grandfather? Gotta be 100+ correct? I don't think 99.99% of people will experience having worked less years than worked as they age.

90. Retired early at 60.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#399

Post by ajmurmann »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #313
atleastoptimal wrote: post #304

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…

As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with a more people who are purely consumers, but contribute nothing to the system. Also interesting that the inflationary effect of this phenomenon is starting to be recognized. A large fraction of the population has nothing to do but sit around spending money. I'd never considered this point before now, but hopefully the Fed takes…

The problem isn't that retirees spent too much money. Most money gets spent by people in middle age who have kids, active income and no choice but spend the money. Retirees typically try to be prudent. This is why you see the large export numbers with comparatively low imports in countries with low birth rates in parts of Asia and Europe. Very productive people with no kids spending little of their money and soon stopping to contribute and cut down on spending to brace for the long haul. (source: numerous Peter Zeihan interviews and videos)

Still will lead to inflation though, as you point out, since production will drop.

I also wonder what that means for index funds and the stock market in general. Every month massive amounts of retirement savings get directed there because there is really no other place to invest. What is gonna happen when contributions turn into withdrawals?

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#400

Post by xwdv »

lordnacho wrote: post #130
vikingerik wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Everyone who can't work gets a pension/state support/whatever you want to call it. Of course, this creates a giant perverse incentive to get yourself classified as "can't work". Ask the US Social Security disability system how that goes.

It's an incentive, but not a perverse one. It's actually a straightforward incentive: you get a meal ticket for life. A perverse incentive is like the Hanoi rat bounty: it creates more rats instead of fewer. There's no way around it though. Either you make a judgement about who gets a pension, or you just let people who've gotten paralyzed in an accident try to fend for themselves.

We can certainly do more to help paralyzed people be functional members of society. Just because you are paralyzed doesn’t mean you have to be worthless.

With advanced interfaces and equipment for instance, a paralyzed person could control delivery robots to help deliver food or items to people, allowing them to earn an income and pay their costs of living and perhaps even invest their money to eventually retire.

Or maybe they could just do typical office work, just wouldn’t be with a mouse and keyboard. No reason why they can’t join zoom calls.

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