French workers protest plan to increase retirement age • Hacker News Board

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#521

Post by YokoZar » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 2:46 AM UTC

mynameishere wrote: post #502

jtr1 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't make it "regressive". The untaxed dollars after 160k don't count towards benefits. Rather, the tax is extremely progressive due to the various "bends". As you contribute more into the system, they make the per-dollar value of your contributions go from .9 to .3 to .15. Anyway, Social Security is fine. It's Medicare/Medicaid that's going to nuke the budget.

The payroll tax is an income tax with the following brackets:

0-147k: 12.4%

147k+: 0%

The number goes down at the higher income bracket, which means you pay less % of your money in payroll taxes the more you make. That is the very definition of regressive.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#522

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 2:46 AM UTC

areyousure wrote: post #511

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…

> The mode (most common) age of death was over 75 in France for men in 1930. The most common age of death in France, for both men and women, in 1930 was 0.

[deleted]

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#523

Post by marcusverus » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 2:51 AM UTC

cmyr wrote: post #512

tekla wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "all problems will be solved if all my political policies are implemented" seems to be a fairly insidious strain of authoritarianism that is infecting the progressives.

'insidious authoritarianism' is a curious way of describing two not-unreasonable proposals that are presumably aimed at making american democracy more representative and accessible...

> 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, but largely they do vote the same way and that way they are voting is causing problems.

You must have missed the part where they referred to human beings who they disagree with as "a rot in our system". The fact that you're apparently blind to such toxic rhetoric isn't surprising--it is increasingly common among progressives.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#524

Post by partiallypro » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 2:54 AM UTC

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…

It's less about wealth of the oldest generation and more about the fact that we don't have a good replacement rate from reproduction or immigration. Birth rates around the world are not even at replacement rates. The entire retirement system is built on the idea that younger workers will chip in to pay for the elderly, but...we can't do that at scale, because there won't be enough people. There are still a lot of older poor people now, and caring for them and end of life care is incredibly expensive. Even "rich" people now will be poor by the time they die, especially in the US. A huge portion of US inheritance will evaporate paying for parents aging.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#525

Post by studentik » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 2:56 AM UTC

Dig1t wrote: post #486

piloto_ciego wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes people fail to recognize that the oldest super powerful artificial intelligence is several hundred years old. It’s our economic system. It’s the software running on all our “wet ware” that convinces us to value productivity and money over human life, the environment, or happiness. It is the paper clip maximizer and it’s happily churning away. But we’re not maximizing paper clips we’re maximizing profits .

What does it mean to value human life? I would argue that the economic engine has given us ALL of the improvements in quality of life, and the fact that we live so much longer than we used to, IS valuing human life. There is no other way we could have given ourselves all of the amazing things (tech-wise) we have today. Why would we value the environment over human lives? That just seems like nature-worship.

> seems like nature-worship

Why not?

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#526

Post by mynameishere » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 2:56 AM UTC

myshpa wrote: post #267

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Upto 75% of population is employed in bullshit jobs anyway (= not producing anything). Source? I love that so many people are convinced everyone but them is doing nothing and somehow getting paid for it. > Only 2% of population working in agriculture already produces food for 10+ billion people. What's your point? Who's going to take care of sick people? Who's going to educate our next generation? Who's going to ma…

> Source? https://libcom.org/article/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-gr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs > Who's going to take care of sick people? Who's going to maintain our infrastructure? Who's going to police people? Who's going to defend our country from war? Who's going to make sure your cellphone still works? Who's going to make sure your house still has electricity? Who's going to make sure the…

You're probably 15 years old or thereabouts, so I'll keep this simple:

With UBI, you will have to drive your trash to the nearest landfill yourself. And the car will barely work for lack of mechanics. And the road will barely function for lack of construction workers. And the landfill will just be a disordered rubbish tip, and not a proper facility. Because no one--and I mean no one--is working in garbage, grease, or tar when they can sit at home instead.

It's the purest idiocy anyone ever thought of.

And yeah, doctors and nurses are in it for the money. No one works in shit and puke for fun either.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#527

Post by jay_kyburz » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 2:58 AM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #467

Manuel_D wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inves…

I don't know what you're disputing over. It is both a tax, and it is an insurance program.

I think if you call it insurance it assumes you are entitled to something, but you are not. A future government can decided to stop paying or reduce payments if they want to.

I prefer what we have here in Australia where you are required to pay money into an account that is actually yours, with a balance that you can watch grow, and that you can withdraw as you need when you retire.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#528

Post by tsol » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 2:59 AM UTC

kaushikc wrote: post #503

gleenn wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding was that almost all countries with advanced economies are experiencing negative growth in producing children. So even if you are right about the nuance in age, go look at Japan. Their population is shrinking.

If the system is expecting population to grow infinitely and holding everyone to hostage for it then the system needs to change.

Be careful what you wish for. Societal change comes with disorder.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#529

Post by ericmay » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 3:03 AM UTC

eweise wrote: post #428

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…

If you're referring to social security, that money is not free at all. People pay into the system for 40-50 years so they can get a fraction of it back in retirement. Regarding college inflation, that's purely caused by young people taking out loans. Don't do that. My kid is taking a good number of his classes at the community college. If y'all started shopping for the cheapest way to get an education, costs would co…

If that happened en masse then the universities you ultimately want to attend will start requiring their courses and not accepting transfer credits or something else. Not saying it’s a bad idea or anything to take classes and then transfer them in.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#530

Post by kaushikc » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 3:06 AM UTC

coryrc wrote: post #287

justeleblanc wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

China is what the US used to be. Even Charlie Munger said that they are displaying more mercantile behaviour whereas the US is being protectionist and enforcing non-trade based policies across the globe.