French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

christine lagarde pushed for blocking wage rise in the EU, european commission non elected leaders are pushing for it too. salaries for blue collar in france are becoming those of much poorer countries and in a globalised world where most of the goods are made in countries where salaries are rising as well as inflation, blocking our wages is only sending us to the third world .

it is nothing else than a betrayal at the highest level of the state

Good For them?

They've been trying to change this forty years? So they were trying to change this back when it ipso facto was sustainable, since it's survived 'till now. How credible does that make the current effort.

Certainly, America has changed a bunch of supposedly "unsustainable" things into ... utter misery for the average person.

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, it's not just nitpicking details, it will impact very negatively some people and perhaps there are other ways to fix the system.

Though the problem is well known (at least for 40 years), No french governments has considered diversifying the source of the revenue funding the pension system. Actually its worse as the only capitalisation existing are in a process to be nationalised.

Moreover, this reform is purely the outcome of political game. Macron electorat is mainly the 'boomers' who fully beneficiated of th situation ( in fact their pension are impacted despite having higher wealth than the majority of the workers).

I personally would consider a reform only if there an effort requested for everyone.

This is wrong. We have an institute that has one mission. Evaluate its sustainibility, and it disagrees with you.

It can be sustainable, even at comprable rates, especially with fewer younger workers if wages are allowed to increase to meet labor demand.

I really don't understand this reform. However for me to understand it, one would need an 8 hour video stream full of spreadsheet with an actual expert working on that reform.

And no media is ready to do that

Oops I forgot about the Euro. Oh well, so much for sovereignty.

https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/uncle-dennis-is-taking-t...

You can be poor and be an outlier who lives to 100, or a rich person who is an outlier and dies before even getting your first payment.

Saying the average life expectancy is lower ignores the huge overlap of actual life spans across both groups.

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

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. Whether that is an appropriate arrangement of private property rights and the relationship between the people and the government is a hotly debated topic, to put it mildly.

Whatever the labelling you want to use, but we know for a fact that extreme ecology is going to destroy our country. We saw what happened with French nuclear, we are seeing it in the EU car industry, we are seeing it in French housing. We already know that radical ecology is going to bring social unrest. That the first to suffer is going to be poorest people.

> deficit that was literally created by giving money to large companies and rich people in the form of tax deductions.

We are still one of the most tax heavy country with the most social contribution in Europe and in the world. Macron is just trying to level the playing field and make France attractive.

> it's about people asking for compassion towards difficult jobs more than for their own selves, and I could go on...

After this reform, we will still be one of the most generous country in the world even for pension and social net even among Europe and even more worldwide.

You say it's "not about the damn numbers", but what does that mean? Does the underlying problem with the numbers not exist? Would the french pension system be fine without such reforms? If not, and reforms are needed, why are is stuff boiling over now? Sure, all the things you listed are legitimate grievances, but it seems counterproductive to get mad at politicians doing painful stuff that needs to be done. It's like getting in a fight with your spouse about how they're "controlling" or whatever, when your house is on fire and you need to evacuate. The only sensible interpretation I can think of is that the people think the reforms are not warranted or there's a better reform that's not being considered, and that's the straw that broke the camel's back and caused people to come out and protest. If that's the case, I wouldn't exactly frame that as "not about the damn numbers".

If young people were understanding the numbers, they would go on streets to push for the reform to be adopted.

The problem is, there is an extreme left group, dreaming of the big night of uprising and revolution to install a communist government in France. So they take every opportunity to block the country and mess everything up, even though they're not even concerned by the reform themselves.

There is a silent majority who is in favor of the reform, which will eventually pass, like always.

if the way to go about protesting is to choose days as per convenience and to have barbeque on the tram tracks, then feel free to do this on a weekly basis. meanwhile, the people on the grind are being affected by disruption of essential public utilities. just like the roller-skating phenomenon mentioned by another poster in the thread, it is only reinforcing the belief of not relying on others in society for your day-to-day needs.

the way people go about it in this instance is not garnering any sympathy by those who need the most support in society.

EDIT: grammar

Quite a bit of my university work in the early 2000s revolved around studying and modeling pension-type retirement plans, primarily in the United States (Chicago and Philadelphia mostly come to mind), but a little in foreign countries. While EU pensions tend to be in worse positions, it's a distinction without a difference: Pension reform is basically impossible. Catastrophic bankruptcy and refusal to pay benefits is coming to a theatre near you, because the political will to even begin meager cuts (and so-called "drastic" cuts are indeed merely meager) does not exist.

Politicians who propose meaningful cuts to pensions are guaranteed a single term in office while the candidates waiting in line promise to keep the Ponzi scheme going.

Also on a side note, I love how sneaky that NY Times article leaves out the option to cut defense. After all we can NEVER reduce our military industrial complex, only cut everything else to the bone.

The US seems to have money to throw all over the world for this kind of bloodthirsty waste, if it cuts it can cut there. People getting back money they put into Social Security should be the last thing to go.

The US spends hundreds of billions on these wars of choice, that can be cut very easy.

There is magic, the rise of productivity. It just didn't reach the ordinary people.

Is this a real question? Top few percent of capital owners captured nearly 100% of productivity inrease that came from last few decades of technological development.

It's obvious who should be taxed.

Pensions are unheard of now, and companies are still struggling to keep up with them, likely meaning lowered wages for the next group(and no pensions). Tough luck.

I fully expect to pay social security my entire life to subsidize those getting it now, and to be dead before I'm ever able to collect a dime.

Honestly, even having paid into it my whole life, I wish they'd just kill it off. It's an unsustainable pyramid scheme, especially as birth rates flattened. Even if I do live long enough to collect, I don't want that burden on the next generations.

The age is going to keep being raised. A quarter of Americans don't even live to 'full retirement age.' And when it's raised so high it's profitable, the USG is just going to raid it like a slush fund.

An example of the flaws of this argument/article is how Social Security is self-funded, and not in any financial jeopardy on its own. [1] Some of the other entitlement programs on the list also work that way.

Regardless, my understanding is that a government's budget never has to be balanced. It doesn't operate like a family household. Oftentimes, national debt is used for pursuits that return on their investment, just like how startup companies operate at a deficit on purpose to prioritize growth that will make the company more valuable in the long term. Inflation also lessens the value of the national debt over time.

I quite like one of those options: taxes on the wealthy and ultra-wealthy have a lot of room to rise. Jack them up, billionaires shouldn't exist, and people like Jeff Bezos shouldn't have a single-digit tax rate.

The other part would be looking at government inefficiencies and flawed policies that aren't on your list, the kind that result in wasted spending that's hard to demonstrate tangibly. For example, should we not talk about how suburban development and the interstate highway system is a monetary drain on wealth for the majority of the country?

It's really obvious to me how building more sewer, road, and utilities per person and forcing everyone to own one car per capita or more is a dumb waste of money on a national level. Our government on every level plays a heavy hand in subsidizing that development pattern.

It would be really easy to afford my tax rate increasing to a much higher level if I wasn't forced to own more than one car just to get myself to work. It would also be easier for me to afford housing if a bunch of single family home owners weren't preventing dense housing from being built, and then all that extra money I saved could go toward something more economically productive than a parking lot.

The average American spends somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000 per vehicle annually. Imagine a USA where everyone could go down to one car per family and how the rest of that money could be used.

But no, instead let's add one more lane and make our retirees work until they're 85 rather than fixing our structural problems that make America a very expensive and energy-wasteful place to live.

Because, when you think about it, national wealth is basically access to energy, and America is squandering their own wealth by dumping it into their GMC Yukon Denali Ultimate that gets 14MPG.

I don't understand why there's a temptation to jump to the conclusion that the answer is to make people retire later in life or cut safety net programs, which are often investments with ROI (e.g., hungry kids learn poorly, hungry kids result in reduced workforce education and productivity).

Are 70 year old employees particularly productive for the economy in the first place? It seems like there are smarter ways to save wealth or earn more wealth for the nation.

[1] https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/info-2020/10...

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 people now is true. But the factors that have raised life expectancy are probably working against this trend, and to minor effect, as they primarily raise the current number of kids.

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 so they are protesting, because it's basically a kind of service that they have been promised in exchange for being taxed each pay check.

But I still come back to the question of what you will do at retirement?

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 social security was adversely affected.

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. Austerity is just giving up at actually building the system in the ways needed for more people to retire or even live out their lives avoiding things like climate change.

To add, simply take a look at the % of USA federal spending that goes to Medicare and Social Security, which are benefits for the over 65 population. It's 1/3rd.

1/3rd of Americans are also over the age of 55, which will push that number higher.

We are consuming our young. As a 29 year old, unless technology advances radically and I have positions in the companies controlling it, I will not get what I put in.

There are many advanced economies in worse positions. France for example spends ~15% of it's total GDP on pensions alone.

We can all blame whatever severely rich people exist, however the death by a thousand cuts brought on by too few supporting too many is the root of the issue.

The worst part is, many of these supported elderly aren't even able to live decent lives.

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 come down.

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'

This is one "benefit" of inflation. Whatever you did 50 years ago in exchange for your wealth isn't worth as much to society today as it was back then, in general. So you can continue to do something productive or hope you were productive enough before you retired that your compensation lasts.

Also interesting that the inflationary effect of this phenomenon is starting to be recognized. A large fraction of the population has nothing to do but sit around spending money. I'd never considered this point before now, but hopefully the Fed takes it into account when they decide how much to hose the rest of us with high interest rates (which the Boomers also DGAF about.)

Maybe the system needs to adapt to humans not the other way around. Why human worth is only linked of how much money they make? It's dystopian.

Aside from that money not being "free", the important part of your observation is on the housing price and how the market works I think. These are IMO way more important issues than wether elderlies should work until 65 or 95.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170131190102.h...

Its 73.5 for males. you only have 8 years after retirement :/

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm

Didn’t they pay into Social Security?

Sort of off topic, but I do agree that the older generations in the western world, particularly the american baby boomers, act sociopathic as a group. There is a good book about this: A generation of sociopaths. [1]

Sad to watch an entire generation hate their children and grandchildren (if they even have them). Believe me, I do not enjoy painting an entire group of people with a shit-stained brush, but it is what it is and it should be called out.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Sociopaths-Boomers-Betraye...

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 gatekeep resources behind labor?

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 are not creating value because they are not working) can consume and create demand which defines the amount of wealth they create. Poor old people are a net negative but rich old people create demand and thus wealth for value creating youth, unless of course they have everything they need and live in the woods or something. But even poor old people need to eat and have health care demands that young people provide.

The forest you are missing for the trees here is the greed of corporations who are not increasing wages to keep up with not just inflation but the value young people are creating. Things like labor unions are a joke in the US and politicians need corporations like fish need water. So the profit margins of companies and the wealth of shareholders is increasing as a result of the young people who are creating that wealth and giving it away to them because they can't collectively bargain and say they want fair pay. as individuals they can be replaced easily if they don't like the compensation.

So this whole old people vs young people and millenials destroying things and boomers hoarding wealth and all that is bullshit.

The education in the US is shit, you can't compete in a global economy and keep up with wealth creation as a result (still at the top but getting closer to stagnation). And the US is essentially and oligarchy at this point. The richest country in the world and it is the rich share holding class that only care about amassing enough wealth that their descendants will make it through whatever shit the country goes through, so they don't care how much americans suffer or get robbed in day light.

This comes down to democracy being a game of information. Whoever controls information controls democracy and this means two things, education and media. You have so many idiots even young ones fall for the trump bullshit because of education and media/social media bubbles and it isn't an accident that education is shit either, it isn't an accident that racism and xenophobia and other hateful things are the tools the ruling class uses to manange democracy.

America embraced greed as a way of life and the greedy rule and we are finding out why greed is evil in all forms as If we are part of a fable people will tell their children ages from now to teach them to avoid greed and pride.

But not all hope is lost, information and disinformation are education and self education are still popular thanks to the internet. Americans need to pursue truth and justice and fight evil because nothing built on lies and evil lasts.

Democracy can still work, but if the voters embrace greed, the the result is what you see. Ask most americans what they think of basic welfare and they'll tell you it's just black people being lazy and taking from the government (in reality it is mostly not black people but why does race matter at all?). We all know greed and hated are wrong, we can't blame corporations and politicians when we choose hatred and greed, these things must be adressed before you can change the way things are done and have fair wages and a stable democracy and solve so many other major issues in the US.

Forgive the long post, let me know if you disagree.

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.

Corporate profits in the US amount to about $10T/year [1]. You can and should view this as an estimate of the surplus value of labor that is being extracted. This amounts to $36,000 for every adult (~275M) in the US per year.

We could absolutely afford an unimaginable increase of standard of living for retirees and workers. We simply choose not to.

[1]: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/corporate-profits

This is a problem with Congress not managing the Social Security system properly over the last 85 years.

> Not only that, every year the retirement age is increased. For people born after 1960 full retirement is 67. The GOP in congress is trying to raise it to 70.

See the life expectancy and demographic tables published here by none other than the SSA: https://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html

That's because the combination of benefits times life expectancy times demographics is either going to result in a 25% reduction in benefits that the SSA can pay out or result in a high tax burden on workers (read: major economic drag and recessions) or some kind of half-assed compromise in between.

Had Congress continuously and properly managed the retirement ages, contributions, and SS trust funds properly over the last 85 years we would not be having this conversation. But they haven't, and now there will be pain for almost everyone because of it.

Pretty sure employee wages aren't tracking anywhere near that.

Of course, this creates a giant perverse incentive to get yourself classified as "can't work". Ask the US Social Security disability system how that goes.

I currently live in Germany, like about half of the population is in the age group that is allowed to work. About 1/4th of these work at minimum wage, and I would wager a guess that up to about another 1/4th is either officially declared "unemployed" (the official definition of that gets regularly messed with, guess why) or in a state every normal would declare "unemployed" one way or another.

On the other hand you have massive automation everywhere, but taxes for companies are totally different to taxes for people, and the basic idea of retirement is that the current production output is paying the retirement for the current old people. From a large scale view on this it shouldn't be an issue for Germany, but they face similar issues like France and sticking through the status quo doesn't leave many options in the end with a system like that.

And yes, it obviously is larger scale, because as you see, it is not just retired people affected by the problem, it is everyone, kids included (their parents being the proxy).

Now think about how multinational corpos use nation states for their own benefits and other such stuff and you see that where things are currently heading on the larger scale is actually the worst possible option to fix anything, it just speeds this entire process up towards the breaking point. For all this "intelligence" humans supposed to have, this whole thing is a terrible joke.

This isn't a maths equation, it's a societal choice, that's why Macron doesn't get it, he's a bead counter for Maastricht, what he does is making sure the spreadsheet is balanced

My back-of-the-envelope calculations:

Sum of wealth of top 40 richest people in France: 556 billion [1]

Annual income of top 40 richest people in France, assuming 10% growth of wealth: 56 billion

2% additional tax on that income: 1 billion

Size of active working population of France: 40.8 million [2]

Size of about-to-retire population: 1 million (guess based on [3])

Annual pension cost per retiree: 18000 [4]

Direct pension savings by delaying retirement by 1 year: 18 billion

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_billionaires_by...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTFRQ647N

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/464032/distribution-popu...

[4] https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/Practical/Everyday-L...

Edit: I looked it up and the net worth of all of France's billionaires is ~half a trillion dollars, so even if you seized it all it would basically cover the French government's budget deficits for a grand total of two years, assuming they were actually able to seize it all and it didn't have disastrous economic side effects. That's France's total deficit, not sure how much of that is directly attributable to the pension system.

Even if you ate the rich and took all of their money, all you've done is created inflation because the actual value of the economy hasn't shifted. An economy is more about the "stuff" than the money - even Marx would have agreed with as much.

So this is only ostensibly about funding a deficit - this is just as much a measure to prevent a GDP freefall from a shrinking aging working population.

here France revenues brakdown: https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-france.pdf

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

It depends on who you ask.

At first, macron is neoliberal. He doesn't believe in the role of the democratic representation in the economy, nor taxes nor wealth redistribution. On his first mandate, he deleted capital tax at the same time he lowered housing subsidies for the worse off. Today, he saves on social security to fund tax breaks.

Then some say it's "pantouflage", and he's pleasing future employers. Indeed, a lot of formerly high ranking politicians and civil servants ended up on the board of profitable companies. For example, Nicolas Sarkozy was hired on the board of Accor (Europe #1 hotel company). François Fillon, a former prime minister, joined the board of a Russian state owned oil company after he lost a presidential election (he was a conservative and nationalist candidate). So politicians and regulators can just make financial companies happy to get a top job.

A third explanation is that poor workers won't vote for him anyway. Macron's party only rely on 20% of the voters. Raising retirement pleases them.

It's ok if he upsets the other 80%, as other political wings suffer from too many similar parties that compete (we had 3 trostskyist candidate during the last election, 1 communist, 2 socialists) so they number of voters get split. or they don't get along (traditional right wing was weak after the cases with Sarkozy and Fillon)

Consider the fact that politicians can be elected and then break the promises they made during the campaign. The electoralist response to this is 'well you can vote them out next time,.' But that ignores the cost of the damage that can occur during the interval, plus it's not clear how the populace is supposed to hold other politicians to account - to the point that there is a general expectation of politicians being dishonest and mendacious.

Really, in what other job are you only subject to review every few years and if people don't like what you're doing in the meantime you can reply with complete BS, often overtly?

Democratic elections are a good thing, but they are not the be-all and end-all of politics. Strikes and boycotts are absolutely a legitimate form of political expression, in which labor or consumer market participants coordinate their economic activity to obtain political leverage. If you won't tolerate anything other than elections, North Korea has those.

Protesting is the mechanism they have at their disposal.

There's a similar situation with the UK's universal credit. On the face of it it was replacing a patchwork of benefits with a single unified benefit, which should be better and more efficient. However the implementation was designed to actually reduce benefits paid out (e.g. they replaced up front payments with payment in arrears, made it difficult to sign on to, kick people off for small issues, etc etc).

Changes labelled with the same name can be radically different in actual results, you really have to look into any given proposal.

- wealth tax is the best way

- capital hoarding is a thing

- capital hoarding is destroying modern society

https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/education/2021/02/11/le...

What’s more, it led to an exodus of France’s richest. More than 12,000 millionaires left France in 2016, according to research group New World Wealth. In total, they say the country experienced a net outflow of more than 60,000 millionaires between 2000 and 2016. When these people left, France lost not only the revenue generated from the wealth tax, but all the others too, including income tax and VAT.

Banks go bankrupt, gold changes value, cash gets stolen. Seems like the U.S. government is the best option.

Hear, hear, especially given the historical priors : (hint: across a generation-sized time spans, governments never keep their promises. Why should they, they usually are in power for decades at most).

And yes, relying on governments to handle your retirement money is completely insane, but the vast majority of folks in e.g. the EU have drunk that kool-aid even though it was guaranteed to fail since day one.

Retirement plans the way they work in Western Europe were always an absolute con, very much like a ponzi scheme (new players pay for the earlier players).

When the young, working population was vastly larger than the old retiree population (because the retirement age was designed so that most people died before reaching it), the government milked their working young for all they were worth.

Now that the age pyramid has inverted (large retiree population, few working youngs), there simply isn't enough income generated by the young to pay for the old and retirement income is paid using debt.

What a freak show.

I would guess that most people my age (between 35-45) got told some variant of this in their business and economics classes in university. At least, I hope they did.

Looking at Social Security budgets for about 20-30 minutes and what politicians have proposed to do to fix it is enough to make most reasonably-minded people understand that expecting anything more than token amounts of money from the program is idiotic.

If you trust the financial markets more than the government that you elect, I have a bridge to sell you.

Sure some smart people will be able to extract profit from the market but most won't. I'd rather live in a country where the people I chose can organize to ensure that nobody needs for anything rather than in a country where I gamed the system and now have to protect my loot against hordes of have-nots.

And if I can't do that, the joke is on me.

If you save for yourself it's likely that you lose.

France pension system isn't close to bankruptcy. It needs some adjustment but pushing retirement age isn't the only option. Also one thing to understand is that there are two criteria to get a full pension

1. work 43 years (this used to be 36.5 but has been increased 10 years ago), so we're not feeling this yet

2. be at least 62

The reform wants to push 62 to 64 in 2. The problem is that educated people will already retire after 64 because of the first constraint. So this reform targets explicitly those who started to work younger, and who are also those with lower life expectancy and with the hardest job. This is unfair. At the same time, France (as in French citizen) has never been as rich in history as it is now. There should be better wealth redistribution here. It's very apparent when you look at the numbers.

Another issue is employment. In practice, a lot of people struggle to find a job when they are 55+. These reforms will increase poverty in the country.

Last point. France isn't like the US were people are incentized to build equity for their retirement. The rule of the game here is that current employees pay for retirees and in exchange expect their pension to be taken care of when they are older. The rules are changing midway and people are upset about it.

France already has high taxes and amazing work-life balance. I don't know much about state of medical industry to comment. However, if its not completely terrible, then raising the retirement age seems like the only knob that could be turned.

If the government can not get something basic like covering subsistence-level costs for its population over 62 working without bankrupting the country, the government is broken, the economic system is broken and shutting it down is an appropriate response.

Technology and efficiency has caused labor productivity to increase [1] and that increase has not been captured in wages. It has been instead captured by private capital as profit.

1. https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2017/01/09/of-productivi...

Even when people do vow not to cut these programs, they are planning on making a change, it's just what they plan to change is the tax rate or amount of debt issued.

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 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 laws are being followed? Who's going to make new entertainment for you?

We need to do more than just have beans to eat.

That's all we need. Basic income will allow people to get housing, internet and food.