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French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

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641–650 of 835 posts

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#641

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…

> Hmm, sounds like forbidding pensions would fix that (make older people rely on their kids).

Then instead of having kids people will work on saving money for the old age.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#642

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…

Your message is wrong on so many levels I don't really know how to start.

First, average life expectancy is absolutely not an interesting measure. You should at least look at the average age up to which people are alive and in good health. And this is much lower. Also, life expectancy is very different depending on your social class. Construction workers die much younger than software engineers. And this is even more true regarding life expectancy in good health. By increasing the age at which one can retire, what you actually do is to make the poorer contribute to retirement money they won't be able to benefit of because they'll be dead before or soon after while the rich will enjoy their retirement since they live longer in good health.

Concerning the whole there is more old people thing: yes, there is, but at the same time workers have never been as productive as they're now. And France as never been as rich as it is now. There is no technical problem here, just a political choice. The Cor (Conseil d'orientation des retraites, which is the official institution that studies retirement in France with projections into the future etc) says our retirement system is currently stable with no real risk to its equilibrium (actually there is one scenario over four in which it may temporarily have a deficit in a few years but that resorbs itself over a few years as well — and you have to know that a few years back they made projections and were quite pessimistic for the situation today, but the reality is that nowadays our retirement system is afloat and well, with multiple billions in positive this year for example). Also, there are solutions if we need more contribution to retirement fund: one of which is to increase wages, another one of which is to pay women the same as men (in France the gap is still between 15% and 20%), another one is to tax the richest more, or simply to politically accept to keep the portion of GDP we spend on the elderly the same rather than wanting to keep the absolute amount the same or lower (which is what Macron wants).

Finally, retirement pension is not "giving people money for free". Retired people are not "just consumers", they contribute a lot to society, even if from a capitalist point of view it is not directly visible: more than a third of the volunteering in (quite sadly, indispensable) non-profit is done by young retirees who can still do it, almost half of baby-sitting is done by grand-parents who can do it because they're retired, etc.

What kills the livelyhoods of younger generation is small wages, no political control over rent prices, a partly artificial inflation which main effect is to make everyone pay more at the supermarket to enrich shareholders who bet on the inflation even more, and soon, if this law passes, it will be the burden of having to take care of their parents who could not work til the increased retirement minimum age for health reasons and will therefore have way too small pensions to be independent.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#643
post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An aboriginal man in Australia is suing on exactly that basis - he has a lower life expectancy and so wants access to the pension earlier. https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/uncle-dennis-is-taking-t...

I've always wondered about suing the government for raising the retirement age. They're changing the deal we agreed to, without my consent. If I had known the full extent of the altered deal (i.e. no retirement till 69), I would have made different decisions from the start. If I have a 20 year mortgage with the bank I can't just change the terms so that the deal suits me better. Why can the government do that with my…

Usually they don't. For everyone currently over 50 nothing changes. For people between 40 and 50 one more year.... So only a fraction of the population is affected and young people don't have a lobby.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#644
post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

China learned about the perils of a child policy the hard way.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my language but where the f** is all this money going? Is it even humanly possible for a group of regular joes to audit where all the money is going? I think thats the first thing that HAS to happen, a clear transparent audit down to the penny. As a coder, this kind of complexity just drives me up the wall. Also on a side note, I love how sneaky that NY Times article leaves out the option to cut defense . Afte…

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer

This site puts you in a dead end. I followed one thread to figure out Air Force spending and this is the most granularity that it offers. OK I know that 1.9 billion was spent....on what?

[1]:https://i.imgur.com/73vv6oK.png

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#646

One big challenge I see with the whole business about pension reform (and government spending in fact) as a public debate is that two sides are talking on totally different planes. In France, and someday very soon, here in the US. And the public in a certain sense, will problematically have to end up voting a simple yes/no on extremely complex topics which are incentivized to push buttons on single issues. cf. Brexit…

I read the article and no, I do not see that there is no getting around the severity of the situation. The very last plot is ridiculous, how can they even extrapolate that from the graph given?

Maybe you should read more about it. If you know how many people are going to be aging into the Social Security system, and needing Medicare/Medicaid, and some simple assumptions about the budget and tax revenue, you can easily generate the approximate shape and amounts of those financial projections.

It is so simple a calculation and so ridiculous a situation, as you say (but in a different way than you mean), that this is a huge problem that will have to be confronted.

The CBO generates those kinds of calculations, and they're not a group known for making up things out of thin air.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#647
post #465

As a French citizen, I find it unsurprising that the usual top comments here are all about numbers. Life expectancy going up, do your part, work work work. That people are angry is not about the damn numbers. It's about the attitude of a political class that had private restaurant dinners behind closed doors during lockdown times where the population was fined for being out walking their dogs, it's about a president…

> 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…

The thing is we are not talking about tax deduction but tax credit and yes it is sometimes literally giving money. In France it even happens that big companies are given money while they layoffs people while they're making a profit and distributing the artificially increased profit to their shareholders…

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#648
post #618

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…

We are living in an artificial scarcity world is more of a problem than us not having enough capacity to sustain retirement and increase leisure time of the pre-retirement demographics. Technologically, imho we have been beyond a post scarcity level for quite a while - its our economic system and its poor allocation of wealth and resource allocation that is antiquated, irrational, and constraining the system. Austeri…

Austerity is the neoliberal elites like Macron way of feigning poverty. They want a small, weak government, powerful businesses, and an impoverished society completely dependent on their whims and generosity.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#649

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 This is an ageist perspective and foundational to what you've written. Older people have a lot to contribute and it's unmeasured. The same goes for partners who stay at home with young people instead of working. They're DEEPLY contributing without pay. You're going after old people in a faux-scarcity world. How about you take on the collective issues, like capitalism choosing to…

Their perspective also ignores the fact that previous generations built the world that current and future generations continue to develop. We all stand on the shoulders of giants…

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#650
post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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…

I believe you may have misread. They weren’t calling any specific group of humans a rot in our system. They said they believe a specific and overly powerful voting bloc perpetuates every corporate, oligarchic, xenophobic greed cycle one could point to as a rot in our system.

It’s not the voting humans who are labeled as the rot, it’s the cycles that result from the exercise of that bloc’s outsized voting power—as said in the second part of your quoted excerpt: “… that way they are voting is causing problems.”

I’m not suggesting the original wording was great and non-toxic, but I don’t think the poster said what you interpreted them as saying.

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