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Comment by flashfaffe2 | Hacker News Reader

French here:

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.

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As a French, I have absolutely no trust in the government to manage my pension. And no desire to hand them that power either.

But as usual they'll fight tooth and nail to keep their monopoly, as they like us to depend on them as much as possible.

Vote with your feet (i.e: walk away from it all), it's the only option.

Yes, that's what I've done for about a decade now, and apparently more and more people do as well (abstention is record high).

The thing is I distrust big corporations almost as much as I distrust big government, but at least, it's easier to move to a different company when one of them really sucks, provided there's a bit of competition.

With governments, there's no such thing, you're stuck with them for 5 years, and their power only keeps growing.

The French gov, like most others, basically only seeks more money and power over society. Whatever the ruling party.

> With governments, there's no such thing, you're stuck with them for 5 years

There are many other countries on Earth.

Many of them measurably better than France on very many dimensions.

Go give them your hard earned tax money instead of wasting it on a lost cause.

What I personally did but very hard to convince others to follow that way...

what is the cause of not having enough funds to maintain the current retirement age?

The current system requires more workers ( with decent salary) than number of retirers... Given the population if getting older this creates an a very prévisible imbalance...

there are enough. there are using statistical models to predict that we wont have enough in the coming decades.

a biased model that is financed by private pension funds and led by mckinsey… I have a very simple way to make enough funds to maintain current retirement age : increase our salaries. france income per capita is the same for the past 20 years, if you raise salaries it will raise how much money goes to pension funds. problem solved

Increasing salaries will increase the cost of goods and services, meaning that more savings are required. It doesn't necessarily balance.

your made in china tv or your fruits or even cars made in morroco will be greatly impacted by a raise in french salaries. butter in france rised 50% thanks to energy war. one can argue raising salaries will never reach that level of crazy.

And where does the money for raising salaries come from?

Same reason as most other countries - reversal or population age pyramid because they’re of baby boomers generation being more populous than younger ones. Soon there will be more retired baby boomers than gen X and millennials working so there will be less money going in to pension funds than going out.

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