Thousands of people protested in France today. The reason is because prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy wants to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Frances pension system would fail with out reform, it is obvious that people are living longer and need to work longer. This is one of third protest in months and even the police are marching. The overall goal is to cut costs.
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Police put nationwide turnout at 899,000, down 10 percent from protests Sept. 23. But unions said the movement was going strong: The CFDT union said 2.9 million protested, on par with last time."
Should the US raise its retirement age to cut costs? Germany is raising there retirement age to 67 should we?
4 comments:
I believe that if USA increases its retirement age from 65 to 67 there is going to be a sharp increase in the number of protests. Firstly, people are extremely unhappy that they can take their full SS benefit only after 65 and if they plan to take before 65, then the government penalizes them by increase in taxes.Secondly, there is already a lot of controversy surrounding the depletion of the SS funds which will cause further panic amongst the US citizens if the retirement age is removed. It is too preliminary to decide if this decision has been good or bad for France yet and hence should not be implicated by USA.
On the other hand, increasing the retirement age would help with the depleted Social Security funds since the government would be collecting money from each worker for an additional two years. Plus, as Spencer mentioned, people are living longer plus many work past age 65 anyways. There may be some protests over an increase, however I doubt there would be large scale protests such as those in France. I agree that maybe the US should wait a while and see how this plays out in Europe before implementing it however I would not completely dismiss the idea.
I wonder if we can use Germany as a bench mark. If they are increasing the age to 67 and we have not heard of any protests there. That of course does not mean they have not happened and of course our economy and system is different. It will be interesting to see what happens in Germany and if it actually saves the government money
France has similar problems that we do. Everyone whines about a job but they don't want to work. They want that government union job but they do not create wealth. Non Value added public employee jobs are in no way a answer to the countries employment problems.Public employee jobs are a drain on the communities .
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