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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

#411

Post by jandrewrogers »

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…

The Social Security tax rate is 12.4%, not 6%. The “employer contribution” exists solely as a mechanism to obfuscate how much tax is being taken out of people’s paychecks to pay for it.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#412

Post by rahen »

ur-whale wrote: post #181
rahen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a French, I have absolutely no trust in the government to manage my pension. And no desire to hand them that power either. But as usual they'll fight tooth and nail to keep their monopoly, as they like us to depend on them as much as possible.

Vote with your feet (i.e: walk away from it all), it's the only option.

Yes, that's what I've done for about a decade now, and apparently more and more people do as well (abstention is record high).

The thing is I distrust big corporations almost as much as I distrust big government, but at least, it's easier to move to a different company when one of them really sucks, provided there's a bit of competition.

With governments, there's no such thing, you're stuck with them for 5 years, and their power only keeps growing.

The French gov, like most others, basically only seeks more money and power over society. Whatever the ruling party.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#413

Post by ajmurmann »

I understand the financial need for a higher retirement age, but I also wonder about the viability of a single retirement age. Doing some jobs that are physically taxing is quite different from my comfortable desk job. Maybe this is where disability aid comes in? On the other hand my mental ability night decline and now I'm simply unemployable and wouldn't qualify for anything but unemployment. Such a hard and nuanced topic.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#414

Post by xienze »

bjourne wrote: post #321
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…

At some point we have to rethink what "contributing to the system" means. What are web developers designing ads for online casinos contributing?

> What are web developers designing ads for online casinos contributing?

In the context of this discussion, they're contributing tax revenue. Very important for pension plans!

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#415

Post by hinata08 »

karaterobot wrote: post #284

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 ...?

> why are they proposing to?

It depends on who you ask.

At first, macron is neoliberal. He doesn't believe in the role of the democratic representation in the economy, nor taxes nor wealth redistribution. On his first mandate, he deleted capital tax at the same time he lowered housing subsidies for the worse off. Today, he saves on social security to fund tax breaks.

Then some say it's "pantouflage", and he's pleasing future employers. Indeed, a lot of formerly high ranking politicians and civil servants ended up on the board of profitable companies. For example, Nicolas Sarkozy was hired on the board of Accor (Europe #1 hotel company). François Fillon, a former prime minister, joined the board of a Russian state owned oil company after he lost a presidential election (he was a conservative and nationalist candidate). So politicians and regulators can just make financial companies happy to get a top job.

A third explanation is that poor workers won't vote for him anyway. Macron's party only rely on 20% of the voters. Raising retirement pleases them.

It's ok if he upsets the other 80%, as other political wings suffer from too many similar parties that compete (we had 3 trostskyist candidate during the last election, 1 communist, 2 socialists) so they number of voters get split. or they don't get along (traditional right wing was weak after the cases with Sarkozy and Fillon)

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#416

Post by anon84873628 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #279
nyokodo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single pension system has the working population pay for the retirees. Which is just a socialized form of the previous social security system which had children or grandchildren look after their parents. Of course, the glaring difference is that social security schemes have motivated many millions, who otherwise might have, to not have children at all or an inadequate number and so contribute very little to n…

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 think the parent comment is being overly reductive for rhetorical effect, but not necessarily wrong. At the end of the day, social security programs are an abstraction across the demographics of working people vs non-working people. And you only get more working people by giving birth to them.

All the retirement savings won't make a difference if there is no one to spend them on. If the population is expected to decline, then you better hope your retirement investments are going into technology that can yield sufficient future productivity gains.

It's apparent if you just think about the farm labor required to produce food, which can't be stored as easily and long term as money. (On that note, maybe the best retirement strategy is a whole bunch of kerosene and shelf stable foods...)

Edit: As said elsewhere in the thread, I fully agree that the problem is due to children being too expensive, not that people just expect the government to take care of them.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#417

Post by tharkun__ »

BobbyJo wrote: post #408
spywaregorilla wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No it doesn't.

If you have 100 people of which 50 died below age 10 and the 50 that survived lived to 75 that's a lot of retirees.

If all 100 survive past age 10 but 90 of them die before age 65 you have not a lot of retirees.

The exact numbers can work out to the same "life expectancy" with wildly different results for retirement planning. And also in genealogy the high infant mortality rate makes for small average life expectancies and you might be surprised how old most people that survived to adulthood actually got.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#418

Post by ajmurmann »

Supermancho wrote: post #405
ajmurmann wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Don't confuse the metrics with the thing itself. The economy is not metrics in the human mind. The economy is me liking Envy apples more than disgusting Red Delicious apples and buying Envy instead. The economy is an employee getting a good offer to fill a need a company has and going back to their current employer to find out who will pay them more / gets more value from them and it's willing to thus pay more. Things like the GDP just try to approximate the sum of all these actions and exchanges.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#419

Post by justinclift »

nonethewiser wrote: post #331
game_the0ry wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Sort of off topic, but I do agree that the older generations in the western world, particularly the american baby boomers, act sociopathic as a group. There is a good book about this: A generation of sociopaths. [1] Sad to watch an entire generation…

If we’re playing that game, then this diagnosis is coming from a group with severe anxiety.

> ... from a group with severe anxiety.

Maybe they have a good reason for it, which is the point? :p

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#420

Post by jandrewrogers »

tomcam wrote: post #402
Uvix wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Social Security taxes are just ordinary income taxes, no different than the rest of the income taxes you may have paid. It does not entitle you to anything.

This was settled by the US Supreme Court in 1960.

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