Millions Strike and Protest in France
“France Is Furious”: Anger Grows at Macron for Raising Retirement Age as Millions Strike and Protest (rsn.org), Democracy Now.
This is what happens when you let “the government” (“rich” taxpayers of a “progressive” tax) pay for your Social Security. American Social Security was created “worker paid” by FDR exactly to avoid this (“so no damn politician can take it away from them”).
And for more than 80 years that has worked. but lately the Left has been calling ..”demanding” “make the rich pay.” this is suicide. If the rich pay, they willl own it and they will decide when you can retire, but if we keep paying for it ourselves, then we can decide when to retire…when we need to, or when we want to, whether we have “hard” jobs or just want to do something with the rest of our lives besides make more money for the boss.
The actual cost to close the “huge unfunded deficit” in Social Security’s future finances would amount to about a dollar per week increase in the payroll tax each year for the average worker. this is because that worker will be living longer and is exactly what living longer wold cost him anyway, or will cost “the economy” anyway with or without Social Security. Social Security just provides insurance against inflation, market losses, or even a lifetime of wages too low to be able to save enough for retirement.
It’s the best deal workers have ever had. don’t spoil it by getting greedy over an extra dollar per week.
note: the Right has been calling for cutting or otherwise destroying Social Security for their own reasons ever since it was invented. they claim it is a cause of the Federal Debt. that is a lie, SS is entirely paid for by the workers and has no effect on the Federal Budget.
I don’t know why Democrats have let them get away with this lie. My guess is that they all . . . just like the Republicans are in the pay of the “wealth establishment” which has been conducting a world-wide campaign to destroy all forms of Social Security using the “aging population” scam to say “we can’t afford it.” We can afford it. And we need to understand that. [it is not “the young paying for the old.” The young are paying for their own future needs, exactly the same as if they were putting the money in the bank, except with far better security.
‘This is what happens when you let “the government” (“rich” taxpayers of a “progressive” tax) pay for your Social Security. ‘
Really? In other words, this is what happens when you let your guv’mint ‘meddle with’ Income Inequality, as many modern European socialist countries do. We studiously avoid that ‘socialistical’ stuff here in the Good ‘Ol USA, so we avoid such problems as France is encountering now. Good on US!
Thank you Mr. Goldwater.
On another note, I can not be here at the same time you are due to my location. Don’t do duplicates if your post disappears. It is probably in trash. That is if you wish me to retrieve them out of trash. What is your choice?
Go ahead and delete the ones that in are in your trash.
Fred:
I will from now on when they are in Trash. Just thought I would ask. I can add them if you wanted as long as it is not a dupicate. Yjis is why I asked.
Dobbs
it is painful to have to reply to you because most of what you say is just free floating nonsense. this is a technical fact not an “insult.”
Social Security was invented to protect the people from the disasters created by the free market, it did not replace the free market…just gave the people a way to save their own money safe from inflation, market losses, and from a lifetime of low wages. it was structured as insurance. the workers paid for it themselves and still do. the government oversees it, but does not pay for it. it has nothing to do with income inequality…which should be addressed by other means. Social Security does one thing well, very well. it cannot be expected to solve all of our problems.
drooling a disconnected stream of thought on a blog does not help anything…except perhaps to lend comfort to the enemes of Social Security and the people who can’t figure it out for themselves, even with a little help.
i do not ask anyone to believe me. I merely point to ways they can start to teach themselves to understand how they are being lied to, and what they need to do to save the best deal workers have ever had.
please see the other post on Social Security earlier (below) in this thread:
GOP Social Security – the Phasing Out
Dan Crawford | March 26, 2023 8:00 am
watch the video.
Don’t thank me. These are Coberly’s views, it seems.
They are not mine.
I get that Soc Sec was set up in the depths of the Great Depression to assist widows & orphans, basically. Now it’s time to do (much) more to address Income Inequality in which the US pretty much leads the industrialized world.
While hanging on to Soc Sec for dear life.
Is it possible the French are more unhappy with the process than the actual policy? I worked there for 3.5 years and did not encounter many colleagues “counting the days” and know a couple that simply kept coming to work when they were supposed to retire. Nobody was pursuing them to retire either, including the Comite de Enterprise (a quasi-union kind of organization that interfaced with management). If you were happy working – and the company was happy with you – it seemed like you could just keep trucking’.
It might be that younger folks want older one to retire and get ‘out of the picture’.
Making them retire later doesn’t help much.
Otherwise, it’s hard to fathom why young people would be protesting a minor increase to retirement age so much.
maybe they are smart enough to see it happening to them when they get old and want to retire and collect the benefits they paid for and were promised.
a minor increase? two years taken away from you while you are still young enough to enjoy them? because our leaders only value you for every moment you are actually making money for them. after that it’s the knackers. can’t see why you’d want to retire anyway.
and here i am getting tired of nonsense. i need to run away for awhile.
One of the reasons for lowering the retirement age was to reduce unemployment. It worked but it’s just can-kicking.
People are protesting for a variety of reasons. Older workers are upset because suddenly they have to work a few years longer.
Younger workers are generally upset with the entire system. They see the ruling elite getting richer and richer while inflation is killing the middle and lower classes.
Younger workers are protesting income inequality. Workers here should be protesting also. Complaints should also be about older workers holding younger workers back, which seems inevitable. As Coberly reminds us from time to time, over there workers don’t pay directly into their retirement ‘plan’, such as it is.
Dobbs
income inequality is something that needs to be addressed, but it depends a lot on how it is addressed. the Left today treeats it as everyone needs to have the same income so we must tax the rich to give their money to the poor (meaning anyone who doesn’t think he is rich enough. the rich, who have the power, are of course not interested in that, so we ontinue to have them robbing us and owning the government..which is the real problem, we don’t need “equality” to have enough money to be happy…though are are people who really do need more money, we have a problem with finding something for them to do…a problem worth working on as long as we remember that there are a lot of them who can’t do anything we want to pay them for,
i have never seen older workers holding youngr workers back. i have seen a few bosses holding workers back either because they are not good enough bosses to see the value in helping workers advance, or because they just enjoy dominating people they are afraid might be better than them.
you have to be a little careful about the stories people tell themselves. i have also seen quite a few workers who are not as good as they think they are and between bad managers and their own resentment become even worse.
expat
and so we want to raise the retirement age to increase unemployment.
because our ruler s see no value in human life greater than making money for the boss, and of course mainting a reserve army of the unemployed to control inflation by keeping wages down.
kicking the can implies that there must be a complete solution now. aside from the fact that i have offered a complete solution now, th idea that one is needed is nonsense. we cannot solve future problems today and there is no need to (global warming is today’s problem getting worse). it’s just another lie by the enemies of Social SEcurity to stampde us into destroyinf social security to save it. save it as a program on the books with a balanced balance sheet that no longer does anything to help the people.
working “a few years longer” is not a trivial matter. it is a matter of life or death for some people, and a matter of personal freedom for everyone…freedom that in the US at least they have paid for.
people are upset for a variety of reasons: the variety of ies told them by their favorite politicians and so-called “economists” who believe in the divine right of the money interests with all their souls.
sorry for typos. today’s are mostly a matter of my not being able to see what i write. i think they are easy enough for you to figure out.
Coberly, I explained what happened and what is happening. I did not editorialize. I don’t support kicking the can and I believe Macron’s decision was stupid. What is even more stupid is the manner in which it has been carried out. And the timing.
It really doesn’t matter, though. Those who were planning on retiring soon will be very upset. Those who are planning on retiring in 15 years or longer from now are delusional. Either they won’t be alive or they won’t have their jobs. Global climate change, pollution and resource depletion (peak oil, peak copper, etc.) will destroy modern states by 2040.
If people knew just how corrupt and evil the ruling elite really are, I think they might rise up for good. as it is, all these people want is what they were promised. French workers, especially government employees, were promised low work hours, lots of benefits, early retirement and a decent pension in exchange for low pay and keeping things running (yes, there are strikes and they look awful but they are generally short). the elite are not keeping their promises. What a shock!
The French left doesn’t demand absolute income equality! That is a straw man argument and right wing bullshit. sure, there are still a few communists in France, but the ruling left is now more centrist. Think Blair and New Labour.
Macron’s decision may have been stupid politically.
It suggests frustration and impatience. It could cost him his job. Does he care? Perhaps non.
Macron’s decision was cruel and stupid economically.
I suspect it will not cost him anything. He has friends in high places.
Older ‘individual contributors’ (those who didn’t move into management jobs) who possess antique job skills and are highly paid due to seniority are seen as taking up ‘slots’ that could be better filled by newer/younger/less-well-paid people. (Hard to believe you are unaware of this.) There is resentment. Getting such people to retire a.s.a.p. tends to alleviate this problem, the sooner the better.
Dobbs
oh i am aware of that. another reason for keeping that old SS. you may live longer, you may not be healthy, you may not be able to keep your job, you may not be able to find a job. but management doesn’t care about all that. they’ll fire you at sixty and notgive a damn about your not be eleibile for SS yet. in fact they’ll pay their congressman to raise the retirement age.
but i am not at the mangement level, and inever saw an older worker stand in the way of a younger one. preumably the people at the level you are talking about have great wall street investments. and own their own houses.
social security does not require you to retire. it’s just that some people go crazy thinking about all that money they are not getting from Social Security if they keep working.
actuarily they will still get the money if they wait: SS pays a higher monthly benefit if you delay your retirement (delay starting to collect your SS benefit). i have learned that most people can’t understand this.
in America it is sometimes hard to delay collecting SS benefits as a lot of big companies are in the habit of laying off older workers before they can collect the company’s own full (promised) pension.
expat
thank you for explaining.
i was explaining what i thought about can kicking, playing with the retiement age to control unemployment, what i think the employer class thinks about the working class, working a “few years longer” because someone else decides for you, and the reasons why people are upset.
did not mean to sound like i was finding fault with you..personal fault as opposed to maybe having the wrong reasons for what happens or should happen. i think..and still not trying to sound in any way like i think i am better than you, but just offering my opinion..that you have a hard time telling when you are “explaining why things happen” and editorializing. quit possibly i do too, but i try to remind myself about the difference between what i know (a dollar a week increase in the tax…would fix SS forever) and what i “think” and what i “speculate.”
im not sure about that straw man. the progressives i run into on the web sure sound like they mean literal equality…if they mean anything at all and are not just repeating a word they have heard that they like the sound of.
the “right wing” has been afraid of “levellers” since before the Constitution, and they believe that “the socialists” really mean absolute income equality (after taxes, of course).
They take their clue from the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and probably Pol Pot for what the Left really mean.
saying it again:
if Macron were honest there were three better ways to deal with “we an’t afford it” better than raising the retirement age:
cut benefits gradually and according to a graduated schedule so the poor are cut less than the rich. this is less cruel that raising the retirement age which is a death sentence for some, and something like torture for most of the rest. it certainly robs them of two years of their lives.
raise the tax. it shouldn’t amount to more than about a 2% of payroll increase and would not be noticed except for the screaming from the Right.
start a payroll tax like American Social Security paid for by the workers themselves a flat rate up to a cap…so the poor get what they need, the rich don’t pay for more than they get…and might need though they don’t think so yet, and will never think so if they stay rich. this would need to be about four percent of payroll if they are only paying for the two years they would lose by raising the retirement age…again, nothing that would change anyone’s lifestyle.
offered in the spirit of “having a solution” instead of just a complaint.
of course if they are just raising the retirement age in order to increase the size of the workforce to porduce all the things the people think they need…and the rich all the profits they need from the “extra” productivity, they should just increase the tax on “the rich” or go on strike and stay on strike until everyone realizes they can live on less…and that would be good for the environment and all the pleasures that provides to take the place of plastic toys that last a day or a season and are thrown in the trash or a corner of the garage.
‘A few extra dollars a week’ is a cheap fix, unless your are self-employed and paying both halves of FICA (then, not so cheap maybe.) But because it’s cheap, it doesn’t matter (much) if it doesn’t actually accomplish much. So, worth a try.
Dobbs
if you are self employed the extra tax needed would be two dollars per week per year. if that is going to make a change in your standard of living you should get a job.
as for “it doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t actually accomplish much” this is you talking through your hat again. what it accomplishes is being able to retire when you need to and not two years after they put you on life support.
but i understand that being your own boss has advantages. which are probably lost on the kind of person who bleeds tears for every dime he pays in taxes or his employees wages.
Alas, faint praise is the best I can offer.