It's that simple.

The NCE religion is morally bankrupt internally. Now it's trying to bankrupt everyone around it.

Generally, it's not a good idea to have high expectations of professional robbers and liars.

EU launches public debate on the future of pensions - EU

The European Commission has on July 7, 2010 launched a Europe-wide public debate on how to ensure adequate, sustainable and safe pensions and how the EU can best support the national efforts.

...

In particular, it aims to address the following issues: 

• Ensuring adequate incomes in retirement and making sure pension systems are sustainable in the long term
• Achieving the right balance between work and retirement and facilitating a longer active life
• Removing obstacles to people who work in different EU countries and to the internal market for retirement products
• Making pensions safer in the wake of the recent economic crisis, both now and in the longer term
• Making sure pensions are more transparent so that people can take informed decisions about their own retirement income 

...

The consultation period will run for four months (ending 15 November 2010) during which anyone with an interest in the subject can submit their views via a dedicated website. The European Commission will then analyse all responses and consider the best course for future actions to address these issues at EU level.

1. How does state borrowing enter into this argument of money created and destroyed?
   
2. How is the argument affected if the sovereign can't print money (i.e. in eurozone countries)? How is it affected if the sovereign has pretty much all of its debt in its own currency (i.e. the US)?
   
3. This means that various announced projected "costs of pensions by the year 20XX" measured as percentage of projected GDP, are questionable?
   
4. How is this argument affected by demographic decline? A note: I looked up the numbers a few years ago on Greece (below population replacement rate since 1980) and found that in the mid 2000s the percentage of working age population employed was at an all time high and dependence ratios at an all time low. This was due to a steady increase in female participation in the workforce, of course, but also due to the fact that the under 18s shrank almost as fast as the over 65s. This, I would wager, is pretty much par for "infertile" countries. Thus the dependence ratio doesn't seem to be too much affected in projections even of the most demographically declining countries - and thus dependents' costs unless old people are much more costly to society than children, which is indeed probable.
   
5. One could offer a counterargument to
   

it makes no difference to future taxpayers what this generation does with retirement age

Generally as per the "slash pensions argument": aren't, pretty much linear, projections of current trends to 50 years' time some sort of quackery? Especially in a time of unfolding multiple global crises and geopolitical shifts? How is it even rational to project that far into the future any current trend and to implement policy now, influenced by these shaky future "projections?

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

The second task of enlightenment is to avoid despairing completely at the contrast.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Osborne's winning gambit has been to split the opposition by not putting the knife into teachers and OAPs

If governments never needed to compromise or take potential or actual opposition into account, Osborne wouldn't have needed that "winning gambit", would he?

But perhaps I should cut/paste your point of view and enlighten him with it...

Will they protest? No, they won't.

i think they will, but will it do any good?

the poll tax broke the phlegmatic longsuffering, these cuts will bite as deep or deeper. right now there's only a rumble, as they haven't bitten down yet.

will it do any good, is the question i ask. even in france, they will have to keep this pressure up for a good while longer before the people get so pissed at the disorder that they push sarko off his ledge for failing to keep order. he's the hatchet man, and he has to have an executioner mentality.

he, like all pols, is utterly disposable, when he's no longer viable as puppet, he'll be subbed by some new orc.

if the people back down he will garland himself with laurels, and thug gvts will take heart from that. if the people prevail, or the admin topples, others in europe will gain morale from that.

the trick will be to build a new system that isn't reactionary. been there...

the odds seem 50/50 right now, and that's already impressive.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

National pensions: €80 bn

Education: €60 bn
Family: €40 bn

Education concerns almost entirely the under-20s, as do family allowances. Health insurance costs for the <20 and >60 are surely higher than for the 20-60 group, but are not included here.

So public spending on >60 : <20 is something like 4:5.

I just saw a report on France24 TV [can't find it on the website], indicating that women's pensions in France on average are half of men's.

I don't know about France, but the usual reasons for this disparity are that women a) face a wage gap and b) take more time off work to raise the family. Both of these cause a gap in their pension contributions relative to men with the same qualifications.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

My first suggestion is that many professional economists, who are far more informed, expert, capable and intelligent than I am, agree this is a necessary thing to do.

These would be the same economists who didn't see the housing bubble or the banking crisis coming, wouldn't it?

While it must be humbling to know that these professionals are more informed, expert and capable than you are, I'd suggest that this isn't really saying much.

My first suggestion is that many professional economists, who are far more informed, expert, capable and intelligent than I am, agree this is a necessary thing to do.

Fortunately, the necessity (as opposed to the political desirability) of these "reforms" is empirically testable. Upon examination of the best projections available of future demographic trends (see marco's comment upthread), it turns out that those economists are flat out wrong.

Now, there's an entire, interesting, digression to be had on why most so-called economists have such a major problem with the whole "getting simple empirical reality straight" thing. But for the present purposes it will suffice to note that they are, in fact, objectively and indisputably wrong when they claim that Thatcherism is an economic imperative.

The French government did not pull this idea out of a hat. Contrary to most of you, I tend to believe them.

And you are, of course, free to believe them.

Me, I don't believe that government should be a faith-based initiative. I prefer government to be a fact-based initiative - and Sarko and his friends are flat out lying about the facts.

Perhaps you think economic recession can be wished away with a couple of tired slogans.

Uhm, you're not suggesting that industrial depression is cured by reducing the sovereign outlays, right? You're not suggesting that the sovereign should run a balanced budget, right?

I mean, everybody to the left of, oh, Friedrich Hayek, has known since Herbert Hoover tried and failed to contain the Great Depression that those behaviours are surefire ways of making industrial depressions worse.

Second, President Sarkozy is being vilified for implementing this reform.

So? That is not an argument for why it is necessary. He is being criticised because it is unnecessary.

If you believe that criticism of a policy must always indicate its necessity, then presumably you believe that the terrorism is a serious issue and that torture and wars of aggression are necessary tools to combat it? And then you must also believe that the Dutch policy of legalising cannabis must be a prudent policy, since it is being so comprehensively vilified? For that matter, you'd have to believe that the most militant French labour unions are completely justified in their every action, since they're being smeared harder (and with considerably less justification) than any other actor in this show?

No? Then why, precisely, does criticism validate policies that you like but not policies you don't like?

Third, French labor unions are about as irrelevant as their demands are unreasonable.

That would be an assertion, not an argument.

If you want to have a fruitful stay at European Tribune, I would recommend learning the difference between the two.

They are all about destroying business, from individual enterprises to entire industries, such as watchmakers or shipyards.

If you labour under the delusion that shipbuilding was destroyed by organised labour, rather than by, oh say, a deliberate abandonment of industrial policy by the incompetent fuckwit ideologues on the right, then I'm afraid that we don't really have a shared language to discuss politics.

CGT, CFDT and (to a lesser degree) FO, have turned the right to strike into legalized extortion.

Newsflash: The right to strike is legalised extortion. The right to fire a worker is also legalised extortion. The two are complementary.

I certainly concur with the government's economic advisors: increasing life expectancy and low birthrates, coupled with delayed entry into the workforce, are decreasing the ratio of productive vs. unproductive years to levels that, if left unchecked, would fast become unsustainable.

This is simply not true. It's been (repeatedly) debunked upthread.

So sorry, but while you are entitled to your own opinions, you are not entitled to your own facts. And you are wrong on the facts.

And those so-called productive years are constantly being eroded by shorter work weeks, longer vacations, paid leaves of absence for every conceivable excuse, lavish unemployment benefits that discourage people from looking for work, etc.

Factually false. Again. I am beginning to see a theme emerge here.

In any event, the reform will pass. With or without looting and burning more cars in the street. Get over it, folks.

What a very Marxist attitude towards the march of history. Maybe there is some truth to the contention that neoconservativesfascists are really just disillusioned Trotskists.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

we're happy to have divergence of opinion around here, it spices the soup.

your political ilk usually don't stick around long, but new ones arrive periodically.

glad to have intelligent criticism, we all need that, not that there's any danger of lack here.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Why didn't France do that?

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Yet:

circle 5:

I did not know that "Travail,Famille, Patrie" was the motto of the Vichy government until yesterday, believe what you wish.

I hope you realize you're stretching belief here.

Anyone who grew up and was schooled in France, especially in those years, would have to make serious efforts to miss what was and still is very basic knowledge.

It is hard to take seriously the pile of tired clichés and recycled UMP slogans you're passing as "opposing view". We've heard all that crap before; usually without it being substantiated by facts (and that's still the case today).

behave like a mob of savages

Take another look at the photos on this thread, and tell us where you see a mob of savages.

If you're looking for courage, just imagine what president Sarkozy is going through.

What courage?

Is he in risk of physical injury? No.

Is he in risk of financial injury? No, on the contrary, he is handsomely paid and is likely to receive book contracts, invitations to lecture circuits and guest lectureships from the interests he policies serve. (See Blair for examples)

Is he in risk of social dislike from his peers? Not likely, he is probably patted on the back at the cocktail parties.

A roofer shows greater courage every single day.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

I am not ashamed of my political choices, far from it. My family suffered terribly from the German occupation, so I would appreciate it if you would stop insinuating that I am somehow a Nazi sympathizer

I'll remind you that the same unions that you have been so thoroughly indoctrinated to hate were pretty much the only people in Metropolitan France who were actually shooting at the Nazis during most of the War. Sarko and his friends, on the other hand, are the grandchildren of the people who shot at the unions. And while I don't particularly wish to re-fight the second world war, I do know who I would be shooting at if it came to that.

If you're looking for courage, just imagine what president Sarkozy is going through.

"Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right."

- Robert Park, of the American Physical Society

Sarko is wrong on the facts. Worse, he's lying about the facts. He has forfeited any right to courtesy from those who have any respect for truth and honesty.

The British are implementing a vastly more drastic austerity plan,

Which is rubber-room level insanity. Maybe burning a few cars in downtown London would make the British government stop these moronic genuflections towards the pagan idols of a patently idiotic economic faith.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.