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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

#401
post #369
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Giving old people money for free Didn’t they pay into Social Security?

No - Social Security for the people who are already retired is paid for by the people who are currently working. Nobody is "paying into" anything.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted. At least in the US Social Security is a benefits program like Medicare, Medicaid, Snap, etc. It has special accounting rules for Congress but that’s about the only difference.

It’s not a forced retirement savings scheme where you “pay into” it. At anytime Congress can change what the benefits are and the only reason it hadn’t happened yet is because it’s such a popular welfare program.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#402
post #369
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Giving old people money for free Didn’t they pay into Social Security?

No - Social Security for the people who are already retired is paid for by the people who are currently working. Nobody is "paying into" anything.

I am trying to understand this. What were the mini tens of thousands of dollars I paid to the federal government over a period of 40 years in the form of Social Security taxes then?

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#403
post #360

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…

Good rabbit. Lot of boomers/hippies agree. Not in sufficient numbers. You might like the writing of Richard Rorty.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#404
post #360

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…

> wealth is not zero-sum

Land is zero sum. The easy (partial) solution to that is just to build more housing on the same land, except older homeowners spend their time blocking new housing, which has essentially turned housing into a zero sum market as well.

> greed of corporations who are not increasing wages

Increasing wages will do nothing if those wages end up chasing the same fixed amount of housing/land.

Now, people are going to point out that the US is a big country and there's lots of land and so on. And that's true, but a lot of the economic growth and opportunity is concentrated in the cities where housing growth is being blocked. The same problem occurs in Canada (and a few other Western developed countries too).

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#405
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great comment. The status quo is so bizarre. Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy". It would be economically most efficient to drop dead on the day you retire. Thanks, human! All of this to keep a machine running that wrecks the planet and everything living on it, including ourselves. Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just kee…

> Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy. Obviously this cannot be true. "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere, but the emergent behavior from all our needs, desires and faults. If something is truly not wanted by anyone, nobody will pay for the work to get done. That's the magic of the invisible hand of capitalism. Doing stuff that truly nobo…

> "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere

It's not magical, granted. "The economy" is a subjective state (eg metrics) that solely resides in the human mind, rather than a singular thing.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#406
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is only superficially the issue. Your currency is only as valuable as there is a market of goods and services to spend it on. Even if you ate the rich and took all of their money, all you've done is created inflation because the actual value of the economy hasn't shifted. An economy is more about the "stuff" than the money - even Marx would have agreed with as much. So this is only ostensibly about funding a de…

Yes. But money is how stuff gets done. It's not an immediate effect, but give people money to people who want food and more food will be purchased, which in turn increases the production of food.

Only if the cost to produce food is below the sales price. There is not an infinite "grow more food" capacity. The cost to produce 5% more food may be more than 5% of current costs.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#407

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…

> Pension reform is basically impossible. 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…

Finland is in a much better spot than most US/EU pensions due to incredible natural resources per capita, high trust society, and low discretionary spending in non-public welfare areas. Some reform is probably required but nothing compared to the catastrophic situations in the US/EU. Fortunately.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#408

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…

That's just because people died young. The mode (most common) age of death was over 75 in France for men in 1930. I'm not sure how WWII factors into that. It's now about 82, eyeballing it (yes, still higher). https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1204_0683--the-mos... People were not "old" and dying at appreciably higher rates given they reached age 60 back then. The general premise that there's a lot of rich old…

Why does the mode matter? We are discussing cost, which is related to the the number of retirees. The average lifespan tells you how many people you can expect to be retired at a given moment, the mode tells you... what exactly?

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#409
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most income for the state is from income tax, trust fund kids and oligarchs dont have high income tax[0] , and the wealth tax can be easily lowered by tax planning [0] https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-france.pdf

Seems like a fixable problem.

Please fix it.

Until you are able to successfully do so, the rest of us will work on other solutions.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Cops are one of the offenders, but make no mistake, teachers' unions are up there as well. There's no one particularly bad abuser of the pension systems; the system itself was set up by either innumerate or corrupt individuals. Or perhaps both.

If I was a pension rep or director for the cops, teachers, firefighters, or whatever, best believe I would maximize my members' benefits to the maximum extent the law and guidelines allowed. That's really all that is happening with these unions. Sure, there is some corruption going on (when isn't there in any large organization, much less government agencies) that isn't helping matters, and there are idiots that are making things worse. But these issues are in the seriously tiny minority of the real problem: People who could not do math properly or were corrupt from the get-go set up an insane pyramid scheme built on ridiculous population growth and capital appreciation models, and no one wanted to stop the music for decades on end.

The most likely scenario by a WIDE margin is that pensioners are wiped out or forcibly restructured in a court of law, getting a small reduced fraction of their promised ("guaranteed") benefit. It just is. In America, we don't fix gradual issues - there is simply no incentive to do so. We ignore them until they blow up and then we do something about it. This sounds stupid, but it's perfectly rational on an individual level.

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