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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

#821

Post by jbn »

rwmj wrote: post #699
strken wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"From workers to retired people" implies at a casual reading that the worker and the retiree are not the same person, when in many systems the majority of what the worker pays goes directly to their own retirement. It's debatable whether paying into your own account is a transfer of wealth at all, even if you're not able to withdraw your money until retirement.

You're still relying on money being worth something in future. Imagine a future where there are half as many the workers as retirees. It doesn't matter how much money retirees have in their pensions if they cannot hire workers to look after them (do their healthcare, produce the food they eat etc). You'd just get rampant inflation as the richer retirees competed to get workers, and everyone else goes without. In othe…

>You're still relying on money being worth something in future.

Yes, and that's why this basic pension can only be something guaranteed by the state. In case of war or massive devaluation or change or currency, the state (maybe not even the same one under which "rights" were acquired) can guarantee these things (and will want to guarantee them, in order to preserve the pensioners from poverty).

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#822

Post by jbn »

yodsanklai wrote: post #289
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #87

The french pension reform attempts have been going on for decades . I remember in the mid-90s a huge, weeks- (months-?) long public transit strike which, funnily enough, kick-started Parisian's interest in roller-blading (and led to the awesome weekly Friday-night roller-blading tour [1]. If it's your thing, I highly recommend it! But be prepared to have to go over some cobblestone sections) France's system has the w…

> Every president, be they socialist or liberal, have attempted to tackle the issue, only to get country-paralyzing backlash. People will nitpick the details of whatever current plan proposes, but the fundamental problem remains. The Touraine Law in 2014 raised the number of worked years from 36 to 43, which is a big deal. So it's not like nothing happened. Also there are good reasons to dispute the current proposal,…

> The Touraine Law in 2014 raised the number of worked years from 36 to 43, which is a big deal.

that's right, and what's so surprising (to me) today is that the Touraine law got enacted without much protest, while what's happening today is taking the same terms for retirement and extending them to younger generations (i.e. those born between 1960 and 1973) is causing protests. The current proposed reform looks like a big deal, but the bigger deal happened in 2014 and was barely noticed (because the lawmakers were careful enough to put it far enough in the future...).

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#823

Post by jbn »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #96
omegaworks wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

̶F̶r̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶t̶r̶o̶l̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶c̶u̶r̶r̶e̶n̶c̶y̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶n̶s̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶s̶y̶s̶t̶e̶m̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶n̶e̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶p̶a̶i̶d̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶t̶a̶x̶e̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶.̶ Oops I forgot about the Euro. Oh well, so much for sovereignty.

> France has control of its currency No it does not. It uses the Euro, which technically requires it to maintain a balance.

if only it had control of its currency! The way out of this previously was to devaluate currency so that the face amounts of pension stay the same but purchasing power decreases (in other words, it decreases the value of pension in a much less visible way, and done over many years is like a slow boil).

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#824

Post by jbn »

eCa wrote: post #656
kaushikc wrote: post #503

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.

> If the system is expecting population to grow infinitely The system is built on everything growning.

ergo the "limits to growth" :)

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#825

Post by jbn »

tsimionescu wrote: post #580
SoftTalker wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it wasn’t properly managed. It was spent immediately, with IOUs written to replace it. There is no retirement “fund” in the way that word implies.

That is the government's problem, not the workers'.

> There is no retirement “fund” in the way that word implies

well, France really has 2 systems (to simplify, it's really more like 42+), the "public" one (i.e. civil servants) and the "private" one (i.e. anyone employed by an employer other than the state).

The "public" retirement is based on the assumption that the state guarantees its liability for future pensions but doesn't actually put it on the books (if it did real debt would be another 2,000 billions euros), while the "private" retirement does have a "fund" (really several of them, one per sector of the economy) but it's revolving money put in by the current workforce but paying immediately current pensioners. This second system can in theory have excess money (but every time it does, a law is passed to extract some more money out of it to the benefit of the first!).

Part of the issue in France is the existence of these 2 systems and the very fact that the state allows itself to do its accounting differently (in a way that unlawful for anybody else). If at least the state played by the same rules... (of course then it would have to recognize this extra debt of 2,000 billions euros, and that would disqualify the country from the eurozone!).

But in short, yes it is very much the government's problem. They (since 1945) have "organized" pensions in a way that makes them a time bomb both in its accounting, and in its unjust rules (rules vary a lot per sector of the economy).

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#826

Post by candiodari »

retinaros wrote: post #766
candiodari wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With inflation at the level that it is, everyone will end up with minimum salary anyway, so what's the point?

no. inflation is really good in an economy where salaries rise. its good to borrow money, its good for the working population (the one that makes the country thrive) and it is less good for retired people (that already own wealth and lived through better economic times) In France think about it, the majority of the working population voted for Marine LePen, the majority of retired people voted for Macron, Young non w…

I think you'll find French pensions do not rise to keep pace with inflation. And especially not "promised" pensions, you know yours or mine, the pension for people still working.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#827

Post by hcurtiss »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #812
liketochill wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has demand risen faster than supply?

No. It‘s greed.

In case that's not sarcasm, I'm in the lumber business. Lumber prices have collapsed in the last six months with massive losses and curtailments throughout the industry. I assure you there is no less greed today than there was a year ago when the market was at the top -- and no more greed then than now. We always at all times charge precisely as much as the market will bear. We do that by always selling to the highest bidder, and I have no idea how else we'd do it.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#828

Post by areyousure »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #788
areyousure wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Pretty much all life expectancy statistics are based on people who are successfully born.

Indeed.

An integer age of "0" at death means they died after birth but before age "1".

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#829

Post by Twisell »

bsaul wrote: post #681
Twisell wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and this is precisely why many french economists make this distinction by referring to the term "neo-liberalisme" maybe the meaning is somehow lost in translation. French neo-liberalisme is what you describe, the worst of both world. A strong state that impose highly impacting laws on both public and private sector. The difference between left wing strong state policies is that theses laws tends to benefit huge c…

le néolibéralisme est une doctrine de critique radicale de la main-mise de l'état sur l'économie. La signification est la même en français. C'est ce que faisaient regan et thatcher, et ça n'a rien à voir avec les politiques de de gaulle chirac ou françois hollande. Même les plus à droite comme sarkozy continuaient d'avoir une vision très jacobine de l'état.

Ok ben alors le premier truc qu'un gouvernement vraiment libéral devrait faire c'est supprimer l'ARENH ou encore plaider pour l'arrêt immédiat du "quantitative easing" qui est la pire forme d'interventionnisme. C'est par ce type de contradiction que le néolibéralisme actuel se distingue je trouve de son idéologie parente.

En fait il y a un ambiguïté forte autour de ce terme et une différence observable entre la théorie et les politiques menées qui sont censées s'en inspirer.

Donc pour ma part quand je me réfère au néolibéralisme français je pense plutôt à "la doctrine politique néolibérale appliquée en France ces 20 dernières années et ce qu'elle a entraînée". Parce qu'une théorie économique coupée de son contexte et de ses conséquences n'est qu'un objet intellectuel abstrait et inutile.

Si on excuse les conséquences de l'application du néolibéralisme, on devrait par exemple excuser de la même manière les conséquences de l'application du communisme en URSS. Pour ma part j'estime qu'aucune des deux doctrines (parmi d'autres) n'ont résistées a l'épreuve du réel. La doctrine de demain, adaptée au défi climatique notamment reste à inventer (et dans l'idéal via une transition démocratique et pas un bain de sang).

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#830

Post by Panzer04 »

logicchains wrote: post #664
Panzer04 wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not robbed as a matter of course. The government takes your taxes as a matter of course. Not taxing you (by giving you a 10k tax deduction, for example) is, in a practical sense, basically identical from the government's perspective as giving away money.

People living in certain parts of the world are robbed regularly as a matter of course; does that mean robbers are giving somebody money if they band together one day and decide to stop robbing that person?

I think you'd have to try pretty hard to come close to the normalcy of western taxation. Maybe organised protection rackets?

I don't know, I feel like it's somewhat reaching to make them alike. Government taxes are virtually universal across an entire country.

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