I recently had the television on, but wasn’t really paying attention to it and then I caught out of the corner of my eye something on the news about major demonstrations in France. I was curious and wanted to find out the details. Why and what were they protesting? The war in Afghanistan? Genocide in Darfur? The gulf oil spill? Climate change?
No, when I finally was able to determine what these folks were upset about, it seems it was because the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, proposed raising the retirement age in France from 60 to 62 years of age. The French pay-as-you-go retirement system is forecast to register a deficit of $32 billion this year and by 2050, with people living longer, the shortfall is expected to rise above $100 billion. So they are looking at ways to help curb the costs, and increasing the retirement age is part of their solution.
Even with the proposed change, France would still have one of the lowest retirement ages in the industrialized world. Germany is moving from 65 today to 67 in 2029 and Britain to 68 by 2046. Here in the U.S., we have a sliding scale that increases full retirement age under Social Security depending on your year of birth. For those born in 1937 and earlier, full retirement is 65, but then increases gradually and for those born in 1960 it is 67. This change was made back in 1983 during the Reagan administration to try and solve the fiscal challenges of our Social Security program.
Increasing the official retirement age seems to make sense, since we are living longer. In the U.S., the current life expectancy is 78.24 years of age. In France, it is actually higher coming in at 81.09. This is according to the CIA website! Who knew they were interested in life expectancy other than for their own agents?
Of course, this is the overall life expectancy of the total population. Women actually live longer on average than men. And the older you get, the higher your life expectancy goes. Each year you live means that you have survived all sorts of potential causes of death. If you were born in 1942, your life expectancy at birth was about 68 years. But the good news is that you didn't die of disease, a car accident, or anything else. The average 65-year-old today can expect to live roughly another 18 years.
So what did the protesters in France have to say about the Sarkozy proposal? France’s largest labor group, the CGT union said in its statement: “This is brutal reform. For the CGT, this pension reform will obviously have to be fought.” Brutal? Really? Asking people to work an additional two years before full retirement at 62 is brutal – which is defined as savage, cruel and inhumane?
I obviously don’t understand the French way of thinking. But then again, they awarded Jerry Lewis the French Legion of Honor and voted his The Nutty Professor movie of the year. So you gotta wonder about how they see things.
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