It's strange to me that the neolib position is that we should have a universal basic income, that automation portends the end of work for all but a highly specialized creative and managerial class, but also that the retirement age should be 85.
French workers protest plan to increase retirement age
451–460 of 835 posts
Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age
#452Earlier 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…
Did that article you link say anything about the ratio of those that reached 60 or not? In a pay as you go system what matters is the ratio of retired to working and in a system that is actuarialy sound and actually saving then the percentage that pays in and does not collect by dying before retirement matters a lot. The most common age you die given you make it to 60 is pretty irrelevant in both situations other tha…
75 was the most common age to die for French males from that time across the board. Not conditioned on making it to 60.
The "life expectancy" of someone given they made it to 60 was similarly high. Highlighted only to dispel people's imaginations that people used to be "old" when they reached their society's average life expectancy. They don't look physically old. Nor are they even outliers. 1930s French society would have had lots of people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s,
Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age
#453Earlier 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?
They were just that, a tax to keep the government from defaulting.
Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age
#454Earlier 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…
> drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite. Here's where the money went: https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per... And that doesn't include all the state and local government.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-debt-25-percent/ (25% of national debt was incurred during the last administration; half was COVID relief measures, the other half was tax cuts for the wealthy)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fiscal-deficit-idUSKB... (Republican tax cuts to fuel historic U.S. deficits: CBO)
Sources at bottom of the first link.
This doesn’t include healthcare cost inflation due to a grossly inefficient healthcare model.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to the link in the parent I replied to, social security and Medicare are larger, by more than 0.7%
Hmmm, so do I trust a media source, or the gov't themselves. Decisions, decisions!
On the site you link, 2020 and 2021 tell a different story, though only on the margin.
Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we removed the electoral college in the US, or if voting day were a national holiday, all those issues would automatically be addressed. The old and conservative make too powerful a voting block, and it perpetuates every corporate, oligarchic, xenophobic greed cycle one could point to as a rot in our system. I don't think old people are bad because they're just taking government money and have big fancy houses, bu…
> if voting day were a national holiday I see this suggestion a lot, but I struggle to understand what problem it's expected to solve. It certainly wouldn't help voter turn-out. Most service sector jobs (the kind where it's hard to get a couple of hours off to vote) require you to work more on national holidays, not less. It's mostly the relatively voting friendly office jobs that give the day off for a national holi…
The point is that it’s not like other national holidays. Stores are closed. You’ll manage.
Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if voting day were a national holiday I see this suggestion a lot, but I struggle to understand what problem it's expected to solve. It certainly wouldn't help voter turn-out. Most service sector jobs (the kind where it's hard to get a couple of hours off to vote) require you to work more on national holidays, not less. It's mostly the relatively voting friendly office jobs that give the day off for a national holi…
The point is that it’s not like other national holidays. Stores are closed. You’ll manage.
If you plan to ask stores to close, they just won't. If you plan to require it, then the law won't pass.
Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age
#458In 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…
1. At least in the US, contributions to social security stop once you hit 160k, making it a regressive tax. Raise that cap and like magic, the system is solvent.
2. Growing home prices come from a lack of supply. And you’ve completely flattened an entire generation into one wealth class, which is a gross distortion of the facts.
Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Your insurance most certainly didn't pay out 85K. They have negotiated lower rates which are not transparent to us. Source - my own kids deliveries were billed 40-50K. We paid at most a few hundred.
Are you trying to say US healthcare isn't expensive? What is the financial risk of having a child who needs insulin?
Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age
#460Earlier 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…
By increasing everybody's salaries, it seems likely to me the cost of goods and services would go up by virtue of inflation. There is no free lunch. At the same time, prosperity is not a zero sum game. The rise of China has coincided with increased living standards in nearly every country. I'm not sure who would be "stealing" your wages. If I were to say, it's French labor policies that are stifling innovation and pr…
Time and time again it’s the same bullshit argument. I’ve grown tired of it. The price of goods and services has decoupled from the cost for a while now, and prices are rising at a staggering rate without salary increases.