the system IS sustained. the main white collar one even generates profits. increase the salaries that will increase money being sent to retirement funds and it won’t be a problem anymore. france income per capita has been the same for the past 20 years. they are stealing our wages to make us slaves and they blame us for not working enough.
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
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 productivity, and it's manifesting in a decrease in living standards. I once met a couple French businessmen in a bar, both in the tech space. They bemoaned how difficult it was to fire anybody in France, meaning they worked very hard to not hire people to begin with. They were also in the US specifically to look for investment opportunities. This is the kind of thing that's choking France.
>But then everybody's salary stagnating hasn't made the cost of goods stagnate
Because Apple, Tesla and the international market for fungible goods like gas or grain, doesn't care about the stagnating salary in your country. They'll still want X USD for their products.
It has, partly. But a part of the inflation at least in France/Europe is also due to big corp choosing to increase prices because they can (since "there is inflation"). For example Unilever has distributed very high dividends (€19B, for a total turnover of €80B, that's almost a quarter of their total revenue going directly towards to their shareholders while their workers and consumers see nothing), while the numerous products the company sells (which are mostly daily usage food and sanitary products) have seen their prices skyrocket "because of the inflation".
Then France should not have allowed Unilever to merge so much, or at least guaranteed competition in France. If this works, they must have had either state support or a monopoly position.
Example: supermarkets where I live co-ordinate their prices. There are 5 big chains and they all increased prices in tandem (and margins, so nothing to do with increased costs). They get slapped with a 100 miliion euro fine every year or two, but what do they care? It's a drop compared to the amount they profit from the cartelisation.
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.
>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.
Almost as if there's multiple supply chain disruptions (from pandemic to ukraine) causing goods to be more scarce, causing consumers to bid up the prices for the goods that remain.
No. This has been the stated reason, but profits are at a record level. Inflation may be the reason for an initial rising of prices, but they do not return to old levels when costs go back down.
> the US COVID-19 inflation is predominantly a sellers’ inflation that derives from microeconomic origins, namely the ability of firms with market power to hike prices.
Average business loans in the euro area are around 4% as of December 2022, though governments are still raising rates. As long as these unreasonable profit margins are higher, it would make sense to get one, and I'm not sure anything under 15% profit (much higher than current govt bond rates) could be considered unreasonable. I started manufacturing candles during the pandemic with only a few thousand dollars up front and those things can get 50% margins which is insane.
I understand that monopolies and barriers to entry can exist. The government should be much more focused on eliminating those rather than central planning through things like pensions that are shockingly complex and have a penchant for unintended consequences. I believe in a social safety net but markets with a little guidance can do most of the government's work for it and avoid be better at avoiding a ton of pitfalls like runaway inflation.
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.
yeah most of our goods and food are now imported so it is not even local salaries that will increase the price of goods. container shipping price however…
> 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 .
Just throwing this out here, but in a globalized world, by what mechanism would one expect Europeans and Americans will be able to enjoy a greater standard of living than people in, say, Asia?
Are they somehow smarter? More productive? In control of more natural resources? If not, why would you expect that the first-third world gap to not continue to normalize?
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 is better (there are other factors like healthcare or other that are at play but in pure economic power it would just be better to have a good it job in india vs europe) that was definitly not the case 20 even 10 years ago.
Definitely one of those "it depends" situations. For instance, you could be illiterate middle school drop-out and pretty easily make very close if not six figures if you worked near minimum wage canning work all year in Alaska or something by working the season of every available catch (16 hours a day lots of OT). And you'd bank all your post-tax earnings as they provide the housing/food normally too.
You may work yourself to the bone but pretty much anybody in the US can make a killing.
when I did it they paid for my flight, my housing, and my food... qualifications were homeless off the streets of seattle and I-9 (but lol, e-verify is not mandatory in alaska so as you can imagine such requirement was easily bypassed by anyone who wished). There is no real 'moving' process other than getting on the plane, everything is there.
when you're working 16 hours a day 7 days a week you don't really notice much outside of the factory floor anyway. Whether it was remote or in Manhattan you wouldn't feel the difference as you do nothing but work. I was working ~112 hours a week when I was in Alaska.
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.
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.
From the European point-of-view, the presence of the natives was yet another big danger and obstacle, in addition to the harsh weather (the winters in the northeast where the first colonies were established are much worse than in most of Europe), lack of infrastructure, etc.
As for land being a proxy for wealth that stayed with you, that worked out OK as long as there was lots of land for people to grab up and claim as their own (or take from some natives who don't have the weapons technology to fight back well). And it's the reason people colonized North America: because all the land in Europe had been claimed by some shitty landlord. These days, that's all gone: now you're stuck living with a shitty landlord again, and there's no new continents left to colonize, so we need to come up with a better economic system.
Knowing a few plumbers, I'm sure it can be, but it can be a very feast or famine trade. And most that make that own their own business, so still blue collar, but not exactly an everyman kind of job.
I've been pondering this exact point for a while. I think we are seeing Western economies regressing to the mean, it's a long term trend. I'm not happy about it, but I can't claim it's not fair.
Fair to whom? Why should middle class in the West vote to allow outsourcing to cheaper countries? That will just destroy their well-paying jobs in exchange for some cheap Chinese goods and Indian call centers.
I also feel the same way about current "remote first" trend - American software engineers are shooting themselves in the foot by embracing remote work. Wait until your salaries get normalized to Brazil or Indian levels. Anecdotally, my company had multiple rounds of layoffs and has started hiring all the backfills in the third world now.
> Why should middle class in the West vote to allow outsourcing to cheaper countries?
Because you can run but you can't hide. If you institute protectionist policies, you will in turn become less competitive. Hence, you will require even more protectionist policies, that in turn will make you even more uncompetitive. In the end, you will have higher prices for lower quality domestic products.
I don't like gravity, but it doesn't mean I can ignore it and jump from tall buildings. While economics is not an exact science (probably not even a science), you cannot ignore its principles.
If protectionist policies worked, we would have figured out by now. The truth is that limited protectionist policies might work to give a push to a nascent industry in the short to medium term. But it does hurt the country as a whole in the long term.
> If you institute protectionist policies, you will in turn become less competitive
less competitive against whom? If West had not shipped its factories to China, I am sure West would have still stayed competitive against China by miles. In fact, by shipping its technical know-how for manufacturing, West has allowed China to become more competitive.
> I don't like gravity, but it doesn't mean I can ignore it and jump from tall buildings.
Sure, but outsourcing is nothing like gravity. It is a mixture of greed on part of corporations to reduce labor costs, naivete on behalf of politicians who thought China and others would welcome Western values along with Western jobs and stupidity on part of voters who traded short term cheap junk for long term stable jobs.
In the 1960s, US auto-makers appeared content to make crappy, unreliable cars until Japanese imports (also crappy at first) came in and improved quickly, putting pressure on the domestics to also improve.
Consumers have vastly benefited from that competition, far in excess of any losses from the domestic automaker labor group.
It’s not entirely voluntary, but if you want to see what protectionism and economic isolation will bring, go visit Cuba. Then hop over to Grand Cayman, Grand Bahama, or Puerto Rico to see what being more integrated but competitive has to offer.
If Japan had completely decimated Western car markets, had conflicting values with the US and posed a geopolitical rivalry, I would still have preferred crappy cars for the Western societies. After all, West didn't strengthen USSR via trade when there was a cold war.
Also, if the long term cost is "Western lifestyle regressing to mean" (original context I replied to), I'd still prefer crappy cars to preserve well-paying jobs.
My belief is that "isolationist economies fall well below the mean" in the long-term. If you want a comfortable Western lifestyle, you don't want to isolate yourself from global trade, but global trade means you aren't isolated from global competitive pressures.
> if you want to see what protectionism and economic isolation will bring, go visit Cuba
Hasn't its neighbour and biggest economy in the world been levying an embargo on Cuba for over half a century? Doesn't seem like the appropriate example for your argument.
It's exactly a (forced as a political matter) economic isolation situation. North Korea is another politically isolated economy. I don't think they're doing very well either.
Trade helps poorer nations more than it helps richer nations, but it helps both.
There are billions of people living under worse regimes than Cuba, yet only it and a handful of other nations have been on the receiving end of US sanctions. This was devastating to its economy (prior to the revolution it was of course Cuba's biggest trading partner).
There is no justification for the embargo. It was Cold War aggression, pure and simple, now sustained for the last decades purely because of electoral reasons.
I completely agree politically, assuming Cuba is no longer willing to host missiles or other non-defensive military apparatus from an adversarial nation.
>Sure, but outsourcing is nothing like gravity. It is a mixture of greed on part of corporations to reduce labor costs, naivete on behalf of politicians who thought China and others would welcome Western values along with Western jobs and stupidity on part of voters who traded short term cheap junk for long term stable jobs.
Agreed. Fundamentally, if you want to institute protectionist policies for labour, you also need capital controls to prevent all your businesses from exporting their operations to avoid these policies.
The Western standard of living has only been possible through currency/sage suppression of the non-Western world. Why do you think relocating everything to the West would be feasible or solve anything?
I don’t understand why this isn’t common sense.
> some cheap Chinese goods and Indian call centers
Then again, if you have such a naive view of globalisation, you probably need to read more.
> Why do you think relocating everything to the West would be feasible or solve anything?
> a naive view of globalisation
I am talking about jobs in Western societies which were relocated elsewhere. And I admit that my views might be naive. But it is on you to convince Western middle class that shipping their jobs overseas, without an equally good job or social safety net lined up, is actually better for them. If you are just going to move jobs in the name of efficiency and let the Western labor rot and fend for itself, you are going to get Trump, Le Pen, AfD and Brexit.
In this whole thread, I still haven't seen a compelling case about how getting some goods cheaper / better is a worthy tradeoff to moving my stable job overseas.
I’m not trying to convince you or anyone, nor do I have any reason to.
I’m just talking about reality - where Western governments, companies, and manufacturers decided that profit trumps employment. At the same time, without cheaper goods, given wage stagnation, consumers couldn’t have afforded local goods anyways.
It’s quite complicated really, and I don’t see a solution in capitalism.
Most Westerners never think about why exactly their standard of living is much higher than the global average. The implicit assumption is that that's just the way things are and will always be.
It’s really eye opening how big the gap is not just in labor costs but also perishable goods.
When I was in morocco 10 years ago one of the buckles for my motorcycle pants suspenders broke. I was able to get a local leather worker to create a pattern from the broken piece, craft the replacement, and integrate it into my suspenders overnight for under 5 USD. This was arranged by the hotel I was staying at, and wasn’t some special inside knowledge on my part.
The mass manufactured replacement were more than 10x that cost, and made of lower quality materials.
Morocco is not a rich country, but a lot of the world is even less wealthy.
You're only looking at that from a consumer perspective. On the other side of that transaction is a person earning only $5 for several hours of labor minus the cost of materials.
Such “normalization” would then also, presumably, apply to the rich. Unless one thinks that a billionaire who makes ten million USD a day is ten thousand times more productive than even a very high-earning wage worker.
But are the ten thousand people he employs getting good wages because of his actions? Would they be making comparable salaries if he had not started his companies? He is not paid for productivity, he is rewarded for taking the initial risk and investing his own money.
I think this story/abstraction of "owning money" has to break at some level.
I mean if you believe, as I do, that money (especially at trillion level) is direct substitution for power over people and even whole societies
then what happens if we let this global game of Monopoly to play to its seemingly inevitable conclusion ?
Isn't this somehow antidemocratic in nature?
And if you notice that inheritance is not unlike inheriting stance in aristocratic societies this capitalistic abstraction of ownership through money seems to crack.
Most billionaires don't really have access to the cash that is included in their net worth, they are shares in their company. If they want to be liquid they have to sell the shares, sacrificing their control of their companies.
Regarding the rich having an outsized influence in politics, I do agree, but I think the solution is to get rid of PAC's. Give the rich the same donation limits as everyone else. Strict legal enforcement should be put in place.
I believe if you set a limit on an individuals net worth, the economy will lose one of its major drivers and job creators will potentially just hit that net worth, shrug and shut their companies down or pass them on to less capable people costing millions of jobs. Depending on the net worth cap, this could happen relatively early in a companies growth.
I do strongly agree with a strong inheritance tax for individuals over an arbitrary net worth, something in the hundred millions range.
>> I believe if you set a limit on an individuals net worth, the economy will lose one of its major drivers and job creators
This is a really intresting intuition. My off the cuff resposne would be something like this:
So what? This does not mean anything without understanding what is the social impact of the jobs that were created - I have a bit of doubt that all 80000+ jobs at Facebook is really a net benefit for a world as a whole.
I'm from former Eastern Block country which went through full blown comunism era and we really did not need billioners to help create unlimited amount of bullshit jobs.
And what is more important for me, as I'm in the process of going through Shirer The Rise and Fall of Third Reich, and it had a real impact on my understanding of democracy - I believe at this point that it is paramount to create system in which no single individual or party has the ability to accumulate infinite power, no matter what cost it bears for economy.
If anyone have some reservations - find the part where the infamous German "leader" explains to his generals why the war with west is inevitable and why it has to happen now and not in next few years.
I hear what you are saying but who in the US from the private sector is close to seizing power? Elon Musk is the richest man in the world and a political pariah. There is a big difference between 80k jobs created by the government and 80k jobs created by the free market.
Those 80,000 jobs may not have a social impact as far as moving the world in the a desired direction but what jobs do?
Does a plumber? A teacher? What if they are not teaching what the party in charge wants taught?
Are we going to put someone in charge of determining if a job has meaning and eradicate the job if they don't? What happens when a different political party wins election and starts eliminating positions that the prior party thought had meaning? Can we say certain political parties have no net world benefit and remove them from contention?
That much power in government hands is a slow march back to the communism from which your country escaped.
Hitler was able to do what he did because the government had so much power. Less power in the hands of the government prevents that, not giving the government more power to police who can earn how much money and what jobs are worthy of existing.
I understand what you are saying especially when taken in the context of your childhood but I just disagree with giving anyone the power to enforce it.
>> There is a big difference between 80k jobs created by the government and 80k jobs created by the free market.
So let's start with the obvious - I was not trying to propose "big government" as a solution here, sorry if this was not clear enough - I completly agree that using government as a substitution for private ownership mostly does not work.
My main point was "power accumulation" in hands of few or even one. Elon Musk is good example here - his accumulated wealth give him real power to decide what life of thouseds of people will look like (for better or worse). You may claim that this is not politcal power, but it still is power nontheless. And thus lifes of thousends wages on his mental state which at any moment can go full Caligula.
I know this will sound idealistic .. but I do not like to live in a society where we leave so much power in hands of one individual. This also applies to politicians.
I know trying to solve this problem will probably throttle economic development but as lord Farquaad said "it's a Sacrifice I am Willing to Make" :).
>>Those 80,000 jobs may not have a social impact as far as moving the world in the a desired direction but what jobs do?
>>Does a plumber? A teacher? What if they are not teaching what the party in charge wants taught?
This sounds a bit nihilistic - extrapolating this line of though leads quite easyly to conclusion that nothing matters (and as Camus has written we are then only left with one important question to answer).
>> Are we going to put someone in charge of determining if a job has meaning and eradicate the job if they don't?
Aren't we already doing it with capitalism and statism? :) Or did I missed ChatGPT-XXX taking over the world already (I swear I was trying to pay attention :))?
But in all seriousness - I only propose limiting power of individualsm institutions and corporatios, not giving it to government.
>> What happens when a different political party wins election and starts eliminating positions that the prior party thought had meaning?
And what do you think happes when new CEO takes over company? Because I have seen far worse cleanings done through corporations that were taken over by competition than the biggest governments cleanigs of institutions done by new party taking over government (I happen to have some inside access to local govermants organizational data and know some people that worked for big companies that were raided).
>> Hitler was able to do what he did because the government had so much power.
Still the underling problem is power accumulation - governmant from my point of view was only means to obtaining it. I believe that we are living in times when new doors opened for power accumulation that will grant some individuals almost comparable power. And I would gladly sacrifice parts of economic development potential to do that.
The idea of joint-stock companies is antidemocratic in nature. If you were to propose that people could buy votes in parliament, everybody would (rightly) be outraged. But this is how joint-stock companies work: workers have 0 say in how things are run and how resources are allocated, owners can buy and sell voting rights and dividend rights.
Just throwing this out here, but in a globalized world, by what mechanism would one expect Europeans and Americans will be able to enjoy a greater standard of living than people in, say, Asia?
The world standard of living should be equalized globally but it should be the present first world standard, not the present third world standard.
This is certainly possible given increasing world productive capacities.
Yes. Capital let's you be more productive. Rest of the world is building up capital to increase productivity, but is also increasing demand. Resource limits are blips on the market.
I mean… yeah. That's not really related to the thread's topic, though.
> why would you expect that the first-third world gap to not continue to normalize?
I don't think that's the criticism. "Blocking our wages" probably isn't increasing the wealth of the people in Cold War non-aligned countries: is the money going to them, somehow? The direct effect is that employers (= the people who would be paying the extra wages) don't have to spend as much money paying their employees. What knock-on effects would lead to that improving things for people?
Lots of Asian countries have a high standard of living too.
One of the biggest differences is functioning institutions. As bad as some first world governments can seem from our perspective, they’re way better than the kleptocrats and warlords who rule some parts of the world. And yeah, when you have functioning institutions, you do end up with smarter and more productive populations because children can go to school instead of slaving away in the cobalt mines.
> why would you expect that the first-third world gap to not continue to normalize?
If the third world raises to the first world standards, then great. If that process involves first world standards falling to meet third world ones in the middle at the cost of first-world middle class, then there is a big problem. See where Trump and Sanders got most of their votes and you will start to see a pattern here.
I'll admit that I don't understand French social security well at all, but based on what I've read online it seems like increasing salaries would actually reduce the amount of money going to social security because that would mean lower profits for employers (who contribute a higher percentage of their income). Obviously, in terms of wealth redistribution, it's better to have higher wages. But increasing them would actually hurt the social security system.
"that would mean lower profits for employers (who contribute a higher percentage of their income)"
No, for equivalent 'net money on your wallet after tax' a company pay more tax for employees than for company owner.
Without detailling too much (and by choosing an 'arbitrary but realistic situation') the are two ways of getting money from your company to your personal bank account :
- a specialy taxed "company owner" salary (you can make simulation here : https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/eurl , yes I choose a specific company category, but it's a common one, you can compare with a the 'standard' employee tax numbers : https://entreprise.pole-emploi.fr/cout-salarie/ ) which give you benefit from the social security system and which cost a bit less (for a standard company owner range of pay) than an employee salary.
- A 'company profit share' at the end of each year. You 'decide' how much you company profit was this year and that you want to give to owner, you pay a "less important tax than on salaries" give it to the owner, and then they pay their personnal income tax on it.
The optimisation game is to ensure yourself a sufficient salary to have a good social protection (and other perk like being abble to rent/buy/loan money easily) but also benefit from company income share wich is less taxed.
I dont even talk about legal trick to avoid parts of the company income tax, wich is way more complex to handle than a salary.
basically you pay a % of your salary to the pension fund. the higher the salary the more money you pour into. yes it will reduce profits for employers but even that is only short term. if salary rise you are more competitive on the global talent pool and you can do like america where a big chunk of today s giant were built by highly educated immigrants that came mostly because of the high salaries
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 working people voted for Melenchon. Hence why macron needs to satisfy his base, old people that retired early and now wants us to work more so that they can enjoy more their stress free life while everything is more expensive for the rest of us.
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.
As I said they did not rise to keep pace with inflation. Which means they got closer to the minimum. The minimum, btw, also dropped, expressed in real goods.
The COR (Conseil d'orientation des retraites) has 4 working scenarios and only a single one of them has the retirement system going temporarily into the negatives. The situation is not alarming at all. In addition, there are a lot of solutions that have been on the table to help the retirement system do even better and allow people to retire earlier (for example paying women the same as men: the salary resulting increase will mechanically make more money go towards contributing to retirement funds).
If the GDP portion dedicated to the elderly is maintained at around 14% the system has nothing to worry about, the goal of Macron's reform is to lower this number because he prefers to use public money to fund private companies that are already making profits (through tax mechanism such as the CICE or the CIR for example).
Also, low salaries actually means less money "funneled to the retirement system", since this money is a percentage of salaries. Also, low retirements income means people still working have to financially support their parents. The elderly have to be supported one way or another. The question is whether you choose to do it collectively as a society, or go with the individualistic solution that won't work for everyone.
Every single scenario in the COR is negative for a long time, people should stop lying about it to comfort their political leanings. And it's not like it's for short time either, the worst scenario has a negative forecast for the next 45 years. The figures are terrible, regardless of your opinion.
Secondly, 14% of GDP is massive, workers have been paying more and more towards the retirement system, salaries did increase a lot already, it's just that all of the increase went towards retirement
> The elderly have to be supported one way or another.
Nice way to avoid the fact that France spends a lot of money towards high retirement salaries which don't need it. Additionally low salaries live less longer, making the system even more injust.
The way to fix it and transform it into a social system is to tax the high retirements for the benefit of the workers. In a social system the money should go towards the people who need it the most and not the opposite, France's retirement system isn't a social system anymore.
That's very subjective, and even someone agreeing to call it "massive" could not necessarily see a problem with that, if we can afford it (which it seems, we can).
> Additionally low salaries live less longer, making the system even more injust.
That's a good point. And the reform Macron is trying to pass will make this even worse: low salaries live less longer and are already dead or in very bad health by the time they can retire (and a big part cannot even work up to that age). Making the minimum retirement age two years later will greatly increase this injustice: most low salaries will contribute their whole life to pay for the pensions of the richer who actually still have living time in good health after they retire.
Concerning the high retirement salaries and the necessity to tax them more, I mostly agree. But that's not at all what Macron's reform is about.
No, they do agree with me, read it yourself again, in the most optimistic scenario, France needs to wait until 2045 (!!) for the deficit to be reduced. That's terrible in itself, and that's the most optimistic scenario as well... What I would consider reasonable is a few years of deficit, not from 20 up to 50 years.
> That's very subjective, and even someone agreeing to call it "massive" could not necessarily see a problem with that, if we can afford it (which it seems, we can).
You can't complain of stagnating salaries if you are okay with increasing the share of workers salaries going towards retirement. "we can afford it" doesn't seem to be the opinion of the people concerned paying it.
> Concerning the high retirement salaries and the necessity to tax them more, I mostly agree. But that's not at all what Macron's reform is about.
Let's not pretend like anybody else is proposing this solution either.
> "we can afford it" doesn't seem to be the opinion of the people concerned paying it.
Then how do you explains the massive strikes and demonstration? Do you think these millions of people and the millions more that support them are all dumb?
> Let's not pretend like anybody else is proposing this solution either.
Politics don't for obvious electoralistic reasons, but the idea is at least discussed in some unions.
> Then how do you explains the massive strikes and demonstration? Do you think these millions of people and the millions more that support them are all dumb?
Not many people understand how the retirement system works in France and its direct impact on salaries. It's not the simplest retirement model either and people don't take the time understand it.
> Politics don't for obvious electoralistic reasons, but the idea is at least discussed in some unions.
Sure but then what's the point? There's much more people retired than people working, the democratic system is broken.
> Not many people understand how the retirement system works in France and its direct impact on salaries. It's not the simplest retirement model either and people don't take the time understand it.
Why would you bother to understand it? It will have changed, and be much worse, by the time you retire. The state is, of course, counting on people misunderstanding the fact that there is not a single guarantee you get paying into this system, as nothing stops politicians from changing it.
And, as you point out, plenty of factors force, to a lesser or greater extent politicians into making the system worse.
So why bother understanding it? France is like most European nations: either you own a comfortable home + some supplemental income by the time you retire or you're f*cked.
(source: my dad was a teacher (in a neighboring country with a very similar system), and is now on the pensioner side of this system. He is single-digit percentage points above the minimum, despite his ability to show a contract, with the government, stating explicitly, in 3 languages, that he's guaranteed at least 40% above minimum. But, you see, "a decree goes above contracts". The state cannot, and will not uphold it's promises made under this system, so it doesn't matter. They just want you to work your ass of, and pay taxes correctly to extract maximum work from you while not upholding their end)
why not? we have 98% of GDP debt and we kept funneling money into this debt.
why suddenly the pension funds are the problem?
it states that in 10 years there will be 20 billion deficit , that doesn’t include the raise of salaries to match inflation (it was removed in france in 1983) I ll wonder what would be the numbers if we do this simulation but pretty sure it will be positive.
Finally, 20 billions is nothing for france, we spend 40 billions on immigration so by your logic we should just stop pouring money and lock our country?
Isn't there other priorities in France than funneling more and more money in the retirement system so that wealthy old people can enjoy their boat cruise? Is that really the top priority right now?
You have to realize that debt and GDP spending are competing with each other.
regardless of whether this is correct or not (difficult to predict the future, even the COR only has "scenarios" to talk about, but nobody knows really what will happen), the current system is unjust in many ways (some "special regimes" are super favorable, with little justification other than legacy, and some workers should have more favorable regimes because of their work conditions, yet they do not and the reform does nothing for these people).
>it is nothing else than a betrayal at the highest level of the state
Agreed.
Still, this is less worse (I can't really say "better") than the first attempt at reform during Macron's first mandate: that first attempt included a contribution rate falling from 28% to 2.8% above 120Keuro/year (if I recall correctly), which was effectively a tax cut for the wealthy.. If anything above this threshold, the contribution rate should increase (i.e. be progressive instead of regressive).
The main issue is that the whole thing is un-reformable because so many consistuencies have vested interest in the status quo.
They sure do, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. We tend to call someone that is elected by the people 'elected'. Someone who gets decided on by these elected representatives we call appointed, they don't inherit the 'elected' attribute. If they did, essentially all political officers (e.g. high level workers in a government department) would be elected, because they were chosen by elected officials.
US supreme court judges get nominated and confirmed. The president is elected (well, kind of, but most agree that he/she is elected by the people even though the electoral college is mixed in there) and then nominates a judge and the Senate confirms the nomination. I don't think it's common to call the supreme court judges 'elected' though, despite their selection by two elected parties.
Indeed. The Commission is appointed by the Council (member state govt heads of state) and appointments are ratified by the European Parliament. Same as with the executive in the US. Not complicated.
Euhm. Sort-of. The commission is appointed by country governments (specifically by the minister of foreign affairs). That minister is appointed by a government, which tends to be a coalition government, chosen by the head of the executive, that then has to be ratified by a majority of the national parliament of the country. An appointment to the commission remains valid until their term runs out, no matter what happens to the government that placed them there.
So it's EU commissar (appointed) -> Foreign Minister of member country (appointed) -> Coalition government (appointed) -> Head of the executive of member country (ie. the king, in most cases) -> Parliament of member country (elected)
Certain member countries don't have very stable coalitions, which means there's always a few EU commissars that don't have the support of their host governments. This is especially true now that Christian parties are in the process of being voted into irrelevancy in a lot of countries (unfortunately to be replaced by rightist and in some cases extreme-right parties)
So, what you said. With one very important difference: there isn't one level of indirection, there's at least 4 or 5 levels of indirection. It isn't very democratic, especially since EU law means these people have law-giving power, power to override the parliaments of member countries (that would be why Christine Lagarde proposed using that power to freeze wages)
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