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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

#541

Post by csomar »

BadCookie wrote: post #253

These stats are for the U.S., but one thing that usually get ignored in these retirement discussions is just how massively life expectancy depends on income level and sex: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/health/ Raising the retirement pension age screws over the poor, especially poor men. Perhaps retirement age should be tied to income/wealth somehow ... and maybe even sex (as controversial as I imagine that w…

I mean if you want to be precise than maybe make the retirement age based on the health conditions of the individual in question? In good shape. Work more. Bad shape? Retire.

I'd like you to read about the Cobra effect first, though.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#542

Post by eweise »

mc32 wrote: post #505
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.

I think the population distribution by age band in the different eras would illustrate why there was enough money then and insufficient money now. The premise wasn’t that you the worker would pay your own retirement but that you would pay for the current crop of retirees and then when you retire the younger age bands would be paying for your retirement. If the worker would be funding their own retirements then they h…

"If the worker would be funding their own retirements then they have to pay in a whole lot more."

What? That doesn't make any sense. If my social security contributions went into a bank account that was invested, I'd be way ahead of what social security will pay me.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#543

Post by stkdump »

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.

And if I remember correctly, the primary motive for the Prussian pension system when it was introduced was to reduce youth unemployment by getting the elderly out of the way.

I think still today that is a deciding factor, as some economies have high unemployment and there retirement can be cheaper and better than caring for unemployed people at all ages. And other economies have high employment and would even benefit economically from a larger workforce.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#544

Post by OrvalWintermute »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #370
_8j50 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 we removed the electoral college in the US, or if voting day were a national holiday, all those issues would automatically be addressed.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

>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.

Please refrain from toxic Othering.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#545

Post by crazygringo »

cmehdy wrote: post #497
gwright wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> deficit that was literally created by giving money to large companies and rich people in the form of tax deductions, I have no particular knowledge of French macro economic policies, but a tax deduction is not "giving money". It is "not taking money". Your framing assumes that corporate or individual earnings belong to the government and the government can decide to allow the money to be "given" to the taxpayer. Wh…

Not taking money that otherwise would be taken absolutely is giving money. Let me know if the government decides to absolve you of all taxes if you don't think at the end of your year that you've been given money. Also that's conveniently the narrative that Macron's party would adopt were it the other way (read: when they "give" a one-off cheque to students or poor people). Accounting tricks have broad shoulders to t…

> Let me know if the government decides to absolve you of all taxes if you don't think at the end of your year that you've been given money.

I... wouldn't? It just wouldn't have been taken from me.

Why would I think it would have been given to me? I'm perfectly aware it's money I earned in the first place.

In contrast with stimulus checks, for example, which were given, because even if you earned no money at all you still got them.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#546

Post by liketochill »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #460
hcurtiss wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Has demand risen faster than supply?

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#547

Post by throwaway1777 »

pdntspa wrote: post #501
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…

> and contribute nothing to the system I'm sorry but I've contributed a fuckload of money to this system and I better be getting the value I paid for out of it when it comes to that time. These people are not 'consumers'

Doesn’t matter how mad you are about it. You likely won’t get out what you put in.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#548

Post by [deleted] »

akavi wrote: post #233
throw0101c wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single pension system has the working population pay for the retirees. Nope. At least not completely. Canada switched away from a pure pay-as-you-go (PAYG) system in the 1990s: > Move towards a hybrid structure to take advantage of investment earnings on accumulated assets. Instead of a "pay-as-you-go" structure, the CPP is expected to be 20 per cent funded by 2014, such funding ratio to constantly increase t…

PAYGO vs investment earnings is purely a financial construct. The central issue is that physical goods and services need to be produced around the time that they're consumed, and at a given point in time, an economy has a fixed capacity to generate these goods and services. If you have a non-producing population, and a producing population, then the only way for the non-producing population to consume a given quantit…

[deleted]

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#549

Post by Seattle3503 »

76384638 wrote: post #517
Seattle3503 wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citizens hold their government to a higher standard. As an analogy, the government can't just go to the hardware store to buy a hammer. It needs to buy a hammer from an American using a drawn out bidding process that preferences veterans and minorities, etc etc. Iterate this for evey little thing. That isn't fraud or corruption as most folks understand those terms. It is more simply not designing for efficiency. Peop…

More realistically, it needs to buy the hammer from a political donor, a family member or friend of a politician, or some other politically connected person. The hammer will cost many times as much as anyone else would pay for it, and may well be the wrong kind of hammer or otherwise defective, assuming it's delivered at all. If a bidding process is used, the criteria will usually have been designed to favour a prede…

Is there data on how widespread the phenomenon you are concerned about is?

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#550

Post by liketochill »

ubercore wrote: post #275
retinaros wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its normalizing but for the worst in developed economies. housing is now out of reach while decades ago a blue collar salary was enough,to own a house.(in the USA you can still get six digits blue collar jobs that lift you out of poverty and give you access to housing. in france that is merely a dream or a netflix show) today already for many qualified workers (tech for instance) staying in india vs coming to france…

Six figure blue collar jobs are not super common in the US.

Isn’t it pretty stabdars to make 100k plus as a plumber ?
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