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

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#621

Post by skrause » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:51 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #556

m463 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Giving old people money for free " uh, didn't the old people finance their own social security? Didn't they give up money their whole lives to finance their homes? Don't they contribute to society in other less-measurable ways? That said, there could be some ways to retire, but be able to work in such a way that retirement is not adversely affected. Some of my friends who retired had to carefully not work or socia…

> uh, didn't the old people finance their own social security? No, that's the original marketing but the payments you get out of it aren't related to the ones you put into it i.e. they're just a tax to fund the program.

Really depends on the country. In Germany the payments you get out of it are related to the ones you put into it and are separate from the taxes.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#622

Post by junofan » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:53 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #601

lumost wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money isn’t sitting in a vault - but it also isn’t necessarily being consumed. In order to leave the vault it must be invested or more typically loaned. As the vault earns interest, a dynamic can emerge that consumers must borrow progressively larger sums in order to avoid bankruptcy. This occurred in the Great Depression where inequality rose and in turn debt loads. The fed has papered over this problem by simpl…

> In order to leave the vault it must be invested or more typically loaned. Which it is. All of it, except for the reserve requirement. The idea that wealthy people hoard money is simply not true. The money is put back to work in the economy.

Reserve requirement is 0% in the US. Money supply is actively managed, so irrelevant. Hard assets are definitely hoarded compared to the past.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#623

Post by speedgoose » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:53 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #612

I’m not quite sure what they expect? Do they want the government to just print money for them until they die? And will they have to keep doing that for every successive generation? If people get older on average, and there’s less young people to take care of them (pension wise), then the old people will have to work longer. It’s not a hard equation.

People just want to adjust the system so they don’t have to work when very old. It doesn’t mean the government has to print money.

You can change more than the retirement age in the equation, or change the equation.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#624

Post by hungryforcodes » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:54 AM UTC

prakhar897 wrote: post #605

hungryforcodes wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what will you say when you are 60 or 65? These people are not contributing during retirement, but HAVE contributed in the past. In fact people pay (especially in places like France) into a government retirement fund. And this happens over 20-40 years of work. This is a long time and if properly managed, should be fine. So people aren't just being given "free money", this is something that they have paid for and s…

The people should themselves be managing their retirement corpus. Some would become rich, some would be poor but in the end they won't take money off the taxpayers. Instead they gave their money to governments who immediately consumed, mismanaged, gave it to themselves and while kicking the can down the road with cheap loans. Now, current governments are left with old people with no money demanding benefits and young…

But why are the young people blaming old people and not the government? And trying to fix it?

Oh wait, the whole article is about protests in France, where they are asking for change, instead of just blaming old people -- which is easy.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#625

Post by vkou » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:55 AM UTC

midoridensha wrote: post #610

jonfw wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the mainland of America has things like warm weather and days of uniform length

It was also a big, dangerous wilderness when Europeans first arrived. It wasn't a place you could just go travel to, get a nice cushy job, buy a nice house, and live a comfortable life.

It had land, free[1] for the taking.

And in pre-industrial times, when 70% of the population were farmers, land was a direct, and immediate proxy for wealth. Wealth that stayed with you and your family. You were the owner, instead of some shitty sharecropper for a landlord.

[1] I mean, aside from the natives.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#626

Post by tfourb » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:58 AM UTC

deepsun wrote: post #614

jjoonathan wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Able to have kids" isn't the only economic factor. "Incentivized to have kids" is another. Kids used to be cheap labor plus a retirement package. Now they are an expensive hobby. With privatized costs and socialized benefits (or, if you prefer, benefits that get sucked to the top of the social pyramid), kid production stopped making sense for kid producers and we are seeing a supply shortfall. If we fix the incentiv…

Hmm, sounds like forbidding pensions would fix that (make older people rely on their kids). Cheap labor is no more, especially in the age of highly specialized jobs requiring education (manual labor is greatly automated now, especially in agriculture, compared to 100 years ago). How else would we incentivise it? Money payouts on birth don't work -- only poor people would make good use of it, middle class would see th…

Depends on the payout. I’m decidedly middle class, as are practically all my friends, my large family would probably qualify as „rich“, but I and everyone I know are still weary of the financial burden of having kids. Although my personal theory is that it is not so much the cost, but the lost income potential and career opportunities for women that keeps people from having (more) kids.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#627

Post by junofan » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 5:59 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #574

crazygringo wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>In contrast with stimulus checks, for example, which were given, because even if you earned no money at all you still got them. At the end of the day, there's no difference from a fiscal perspective between handing a company a $1M check and giving them a $1M tax deduction. While I agree that this is technically a distinction (ie. tax deductions require a tax liability to actually be used, as opposed to cash which ca…

I think you mean tax credit instead of tax deduction, and even then there is a substantial difference from a fiscal perspective.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#628

Post by magicalhippo » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 6:02 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #565

notch898a wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely economically, only a total moron would have a child. Child labor has been outlawed and society says the (grown) child is their cash cow not yours, so the retirement from taxing the kid is spread across everyone else. Meanwhile you're asked to pay the lions share of the investment for everybody else to cash out on. So the name of the game is to let everybody else have the kids and free-ride the fuck out of that…

>This is a huge departure from almost all of human history except the last 100 years in the developed world, where the family formerly was the safety net so these kind of investments and arrangements stayed in the family leaving a much stronger economic incentive for children. except the evidence seems to point towards kids being a net drain, even in preindustrial societies. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/w…

Feels a bit like saying the compressor is a net drain on a jet engine. Sure, if you disconnected the compressor while running, the engine would make a lot of power for a very brief moment. But the compressor is needed to keep the engine running.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#629

Post by blue039 » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 6:14 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #590

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 you are employed in manual labor then I'm not sure how working into your mid-70s is supposed to work. It seems like it's just saying that people should go off and die.

[dead]

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#630

Post by blue039 » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 6:17 AM UTC

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…

[dead]