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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

That's what you get when 60%+ of the wealth generated in the last two years went to the top 1% and you ask the bottom 80% to work two years longer to cover for an imaginary deficit

fyi taxing the 40 richest people in France 2% more would cover the same amount of money as having the entire active population work 2 more years.

edit: since it's not clear, I'm talking about pension related debt (the main argument of the french government for raising the retirement age), obviously not the national debt/deficit

edit2: ah and 25% of the poorest workers are already dead by 62 https://www.liberation.fr/resizer/J5W0vs_DrAdsjx5xHUxhhC_otn...

and 30% of people above 60 are unemployed because nobody hire seniors https://lemagdusenior.ouest-france.fr/article-78-combien-fra...

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> fyi taxing the 40 richest people in France 2% more would cover the same amount of money as having the entire active population work 2 more years.

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...

Feel free to contact oxfam: https://www.oxfamfrance.org/rapports/nouveau-rapport-la-loi-...

Where in your link does it say taxing the ultra wealthy would be enough to cover the pension shortfall? I'll give you a hint: nowhere.

> Oxfam France a calculé que seulement 2% de la fortune des milliardaires français suffirait à financer le déficit attendu des retraites.

I suspect the disconnect, then, is that the statement you quote appears to be referring to a tax on wealth, not income.

Moving the 2% to that puts it in the right order of magnitude; at that point, the discrepancy is likely to be in the guess of the retiring population size.

You claimed:

> taxing the 40 richest people in France 2% more...

That quote is about a 2% wealth tax.

I think the idea is to tax the wealth, not the income on it, which at 10% would be well above the yields of pretty much any asset.

This is what? Personal wealth? But wealth in France is rarely personal. It is rather distributed over controlling shares of private businesses and foundations, board seats and god knows what.

The richest family of France counts at least 700 members and most of these people run businesses from retail to mobile apps to media.

The French are no stupid. The state can not easily extort money from the likes of Mulliez, but it should try harder, not seek easy money from the working class.

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

Unrealized capital gains aren't "income". Are the words "wealth tax" scary or something?

France's deficit is not imaginary. Yes, taxing the right people the right amounts (and successfully getting them to pay) would solve the problem, but the hole that needs to be plugged is 100% real.

> France's deficit is not imaginary

The deficit due to the pension system*, even the governmental agency in charge of it said so

So there is a hole?

According to Macron, yes. According to the people in charge of determining if there is one, no

There is no hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsL1wT8jxVU. The French government based their diagnostic on a report by the COR (their advisory board) but that report had only one (among many other) scenarios where they might be a hole. The President of that board said it very clearly in his Senate hearing (above)

No, this is what happens when you make almost the entire population dependent on the state for retirement, it makes changes and cuts difficult and limits the options the country has to adapt to changing economic, demographic, and other circumstances. Kind of like how at the start of COVID in the US there were arguments like "We can't close down schools because poor kids won't be able to get their free school lunches."

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.

Don’t worry, those free school lunches won’t last for much longer at the rate things are going.

Yes, much better to leave them to their own devices. Then the state is free to just let those inconvenient poor people die.

The guy you replied to didn't advocate to leave people to their own devices but to have a retirement system that is a healthy mix of different sources of revenue / investments rather than 100% from the state.

And similarly I wasn't saying to not feed poor kids, I was saying that by making it dependent of physical schools it limits the ability of the country to adapt and make changes like remote learning, responding to a pandemic (though I'm doubtful school closures accomplished much if anything in that regard), etc. Flexible ways to accomplish the same or similar goals are preferable to enshrining one specific way of doing so in law.

I'm talking about pension related debt, not the entire national debt

> Kind of like how at the start of COVID in the US there were arguments like "We can't close down schools because poor kids won't be able to get their free school lunches."

You should ask yourself why kids can't get their basic needs such as nutrition covered then...

The pension deficit is 30 billion a year, so seizure of all French billionaires' wealth would still only cover the shortfall for 15 to 20 years.

30 billion a year? Second time I read this, where does it come from? I thought the system was beneficiary in 2021 and 2022? +900M in 2021 and +3B in 2022?

I'd love to find where your information come from, mine is from the Cors (public entity) and from Agirco (private entity). Do you have this information from Facebook?

Edit: full disclosure, I just walked 3 hours, danced in front of the police while holding a sign, so I might have my sources wrong, but I tried to only get them from ddg front page. Didn't see the 30B figure anywhere, I know it's a lie, and I just want to embarrass parent poster for it.

No deficit for now: https://www.dna.fr/social/2022/09/13/le-regime-de-retraite-b...

Slight deficit expected in short term

Equilibrium at medium term

Money is only superficially the issue. Your currency is only as valuable as there is a market of goods and services to spend it on.

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.

Yes. But money is how stuff gets done.

It's not an immediate effect, but give people money to people who want food and more food will be purchased, which in turn increases the production of food.

Only if the cost to produce food is below the sales price. There is not an infinite "grow more food" capacity. The cost to produce 5% more food may be more than 5% of current costs.

This is the same idea behind trickle down economics, but I don't think reality really works this way. Simply giving people money does not inherently create economic growth.

I don't doubt you, but do you have a source? I don't know anything about the economics of France and I'm kind of interested now.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-bag-nearly...

https://www.tf1info.fr/economie/reforme-des-retraites-2023-y...

https://www.cor-retraites.fr/node/595

https://linsoumission.fr/2023/01/16/retraites-milliardaires-...

The total net worth of all of French billionaires is ~half a trillion dollars, so it could only cover the 30 billion per year pension deficit for about 15 to 20 years if you seized 100% of their wealth (and somehow didn't cause disastrous economic side effects in the process). Not seeing anything in your first two links to support your claim, not going to bother with the other two links. I just really wish the "eat the rich" UBI crowd wasn't so innumerate.

> 30 billion per year pension deficit

> I just really wish the "eat the rich" UBI crowd wasn't so innumerate.

It was +3.2b in 2022, + 0.9m in 2021, with a slight deficit predicted in the short term and equilibrium from 2030s (average scenario)

tl;dr : it's not a big deal, and certainly not the real reason of the change in retirement age

Thanks

Wealth was not generated, prices rose. Those are valuations, they did not come out of the pockets of the workers. A wealth tax would suppress those prices, not to mention capital flight. It just does not work. If it did, everyone would do it.

So I pay my gas twice as much as 5 years ago, the dude selling the gas gets twice as much money, but nothing changed ?

http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/27887.jpeg

The gas supply did in fact change, as did demand. Even a small shortage can drive prices up dramatically, because gasoline is critically important.

Prices yes, you're looking at _profits_ though

If you have a 5% profit margin and the price doubles, so do your profits. Of course you could lower your profit margins and pass up on the opportunity of the decade.

I mean yeah if you're view of the world is so distorted that a war is an "opportunity"...

That's exactly what's wrong and why people protest against this system so you're making my point

Of course rising prices are an opportunity for producers, war or not. If war had devastated their profits, you wouldn't bat an eye.

Moreover, the prospect of profits is what gets the supply going in the first place. Many shortsighted politicians have proposed to instate price caps to curb "immoral" profits - which would make an actual shortage more likely. After all, some gas at a high price is better than no gas, at any price.

I am in fact not making your point. Your moral concerns are completely independent of whether your proposal would work. I'd be in favor of wealth tax if it worked. It doesn't work.

Or maybe the poorer parts of society should stop trying to be overeliant on the tax levied on a minority of skilled earners (so no trust fund kids) creating welfarism/populism, breaking the fabric of society (as in ancient Rome),incentivizing emigration/delocalization of taxbase; and try to be more selfsufficient from a budget stanpoint, like having a self-funded pension system, that in France case would be increasing contribution, raising retirement age, linking pension output to having kids (to stabilize age pyramid)

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

So what the US is doing ?

I don't feel like they're doing much better, especially for the bottom 30%

They aren't doing any better, and for the same reasons.

> the same reasons.

Which reasons ? Both systems are about as opposed as you can imagine without straight up walking out of capitalism

Yes, keep going...

You're the one making vague arguments, I'm not going to do your homework

USA is a lot inefficient with spending money as a lot of it get syphoned in one way or another from various interest groups, from big pharma/healthcare/insurance, hedge funds that run universities to local government that run homeless shelter in opaque way (ask Cuomo sister). As OECD data, US social spending as % of GDP is above OECD average at 22.7%[0]

[0]https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social-spending.htm

"skilled earners" here being a euphemism for inherited wealth oligarchs and trust fund kiddies, or are we pretending wage earing individuals are included in the top 1%?

most income for the state is from income tax, trust fund kids and oligarchs dont have high income tax[0] , and the wealth tax can be easily lowered by tax planning

[0]https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-france.pdf

Seems like a fixable problem.

Please fix it.

Until you are able to successfully do so, the rest of us will work on other solutions.

are we pretending wage earing individuals are included in the top 1%?

You seem to be confusing the top 1% with the top 0.01%. The vast majority of top 1% income earners -- in Canada, the number was recently reported as 95% by Statistics Canada -- are employed, with the largest numbers being in management, medicine, and "business professional" (lawyers, accountants, etc) professions.

I suppose that's fair. Quibbling about where to put the decimal point doesn't invalidate the larger issue however.

Blame and tax the poor, and force them to breed. Nice plans. Perhaps you'd like to start your plan by swooping into France via Belgium.

ironically the leverage that poor people had and have is their children, once upon a time for farming landlords & factory owners, today for government revenues, bcs poor people & middle class pay the most taxes in % as VAT, income tax, fees, contributions, etc... and dont have tax planning while making the welfarism looking remotely sustainable, but with modern demographic trends things are changing for the worse, and with printing money and "eating the rich" as the only policies on the table, we dont solve anything except kicking the can down the road

And for the invading France via Belgium joke, it is hilarious bcs one of the compelling reasons why he started his aggressions in 1939 before the nation was ready was because he emptied German coffers to prop up his Nationalsocialistic welfare system and (he felt he) needed just an imperialistic trip to refill them[0]. the rest is history

[0]https://youtu.be/mLHG4IfYE1w?t=1108

skilled workers don't make a buck in France

as an engineer, you choose to stay in France for the values, for the quality of life, for your family, or from some kind of patriotism after having had free college.

And you go the USA for money !

Median earnings for engineering graduates is 36k/year in most schools. After direct 'contributions', you're lucky to get about 2000k€ /month (on which you have to save for other income taxes for the end of the year)

My first engineering job, during COVID, was paid 20k€/year ! (bellow the legal minimum, but it was declared as an internship)

It's far from the 6 figure salaries in cali !

Medical doctors should do about 6000€/month too.

Companies in here don't care about hiring skilled workers. They want cheap workers, because they have no long term R&D.

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