That’s not true: Âge légal, carrières longues... Ce que contient la réforme des retraites adoptée ce lundi
Those who started to work before 16 (respectively 18, 20, 21) and never stopped to work will be allowed to retire at 58 (resp. 60, 62, 63).
That’s not true either. You’ll get a full pension if you retire at 67 in any case.
Well that’s great news!
I predict at least a couple earthwide catastrophic events until my retirement, so everything is up to interpretation until then.
That’s true here as well, but mostly for temporary contracts or semi-public organisations. Public servants with permanent contracts have so many perks that it won’t matter if the laws change or not. For example, since they can’t get fired unless they are condemned in an uncontested way for a horrible crime, they usually run side businesses during working hours or they work privately for cash (doing taxes, running construction projects, keeping kiosks, working in family businesses etc).
Also, their core salary is always more secure than the core salary in the private sector and they get all the incentive perks as well, something that is rare in the private sector or it happens in name only. Public servants get a bonus if they arrive at work on time or if they use computers. With all these perks in mind, retirement money is something they can count on within reasonable limits.
And even then it’s not a given.
It’s like that in the Netherlands (at least it will be in 2024, it may grow to 70 in 2050 or so, depending on further increase of life expectency). Civil servants typically retire 6 months earlier. Feasibility studies are ongoing in regard to earlier retirement for heavy professions after working for 45 years.
Currently, some trades have arrangements that enable such employees to retire at 64.
You can retire at 60 if you have the financial means to cover your finances until your pension starts.
In some cases it’s possible to retire at 55 with a pension from day 1, but each year earlier retirement would reduce your monthly pension by some 6%, so you would still need a significant financial buffer to make up for that gap for some 25 years, or you’d need to switch to a much more frugal life-style.
I predict 1 galaxy-wide
Which is why we need to learn from other countries and see that it does not happen to us. I’ve said it before, people in large numbers are the same everywhere since we are the same species. If one tactic works in one place, it will be copied and tried elsewhere.
I could mention examples, but I think that it would detract from my point since people would latch on to them and ignore the point, which is:
Since our standard response since the dawn of time (in a way, we can actually call it a “mental reflex”) to any crisis is collectivism and “give every power to the leader, just DO something”, then is there any surprise that they keep doing the same trick?
There are so many instincts and reflexes that we have changed, improved or subdued, due to the rise of civilisation and society. It is high time we set our sights on this one as well. Next time there is a crisis, do we have the guts to say “those are the tools you were given, this is why you were voted and you get paid so much, deal with it and do not ask for more”.
I doubt it that it can be done so soon, but at least, next time we should have it in our minds to say no to granting leaders any “super-power mode” periods.
Again, it is good to take lessons from other countries. If your neighbour’s house is burning, eventually the fire will come to your house as well.
Here are two examples from here, one recent and one from a year ago:
As you can see, people are just passing by, not doing anything wrong. And then the order comes “beat them up” and they do beat them up. Just like that.
As for this video:
It is twelve seconds and speaks for itself 
There was another one which we see that fellow just walking away like nothing happened, BEHIND the lines of the police. Here is the video and you can see him leave unharmed at 0:15, while for the rest of the video everybody else gets teargassed and beaten up, without doing anything wrong.
It is not cynicism ( @gennan ), it is what happens in reality. You either learn from it or it will eventually happen to your country as well.
And people will do that thinking that it is “revenge time” and that with this vote their voices will be heard, but in reality, the police (and riot police specifically) will probably double. Again what happened elsewhere should give you hints of that future. This is exactly what happened here in the last years. They even hired more police officers and priests during covid and they fired/suspended doctors 
What all those pencil-shovers forget is that life-expectancy with “work ability” do not follow one another.
Sure, someone might live up to 90, but that doesn’t mean that we can expect them to farm or climb scaffolds or even show up into an office work at SEVENTY. Even if they wanted to keep working, eventually most of those people will either not be able to work or be fired and end up unemployed.
This will not end well.
Most of the days what keeps people going is the hope that there is an end to the tunnel which daily life has dug them in ( to paraphrase a famous quote: “six years in primary school, six years in middle/high school, six years in university, six years at work, then had my own children and the cycle repeated for them and myself. Where did my life go?” ). And that end of the tunnel is “the magical land of pension”, the super carrot that keeps the donkey plodding along.
If you take away the carrot, the donkey might stop moving.
Already marriages, births, building houses, investing in making things and plans for the next generations are being reduced almost to the point where we are losing population now (in Greece - soon in the other EU countries). Why would anyone marry if they cannot afford it or cannot rent or build a house. If that is their life, they cannot even afford to raise children, so they forego that as well. Now the pension will go at 70? Yeah right, “good idea” …
Compared to working till they die, people will eventually see that there is no carrot and opt of the “much more frugal life-style” and then we will see who will buy all that crap that comes out every year so that companies can keep on with the “perpetual growth” business model. Noone and, just like what happened here, they will shut down and move away and rinse and repeat the whole thing elsewhere for profit.
Prepare and learn or you will eventually become like Greece.
Thank you @ArsenLapin1 for an exceptionally enlightening post. In particular, I did not know this:
Our media is so nearly worthless, especially regarding foreign news.
Your situation seems like one more manifestation of the tyranny that has spread across the world, including in the U.S.
Yes, this is the new favorite tactic of our government too. Once upon a time, our Constitution protected us from this kind of thing. But today the Constitution is practically a dead letter.
Read foreign news then. 
There are English versions of news sites for most countries in the world. You are literally blessed with speaking English as a native language and since it is the lingua franka of the vast majority of the world, what is stopping you from reading other media on an issue you are interested in, if you deem that yours are inadequate?
I hear this complaint a lot, but I do not understand how is it still said with a straight face.
It is not like we are in the 1960 where the excuse “hey, I cannot get a French newspaper and I cannot speak French either way” was actually valid.
I used to watch Japanese news and French news on TV, and I used to regularly check a German English-language newspaper online, but the TV programs went away with the end of broadcast TV, and I seem to have much less time nowadays (too much OGS, I suppose). Moreover, I am weary, as are many friends. Studies suggest that following the news closely, as well as participating in social media, increases unhappiness, and many people say this too. It seems to be like that old aphorism, “Ignorance is bliss, when 'tis folly to be wise.” But so much of today’s news is so urgent (unlike in times past), that cutting oneself off completely could be dangerous. One must find a balance, I suppose.
It most certainly does.
I don’t think I’ve watched “the news” since I was a kid and the last newspaper I bought was in 2006. I do not use twitter or social media to get news and I do not actively follow any news sites. Yet, in most subjects, I end up being over-informed time and time again, without getting the stress and unhappiness of following the “news cycle”.
The way is easy. I go about in my life and if I find something interesting, I do not wait for “the news” to tell me about it. I bypass them and read on it myself.
I’ll give you an example. In 2019 there were riots and protests in Greece about a deal with FYROM (now officially North Macedonia), about the dispute we have with them over the name of their country and a lot of other things. The news went ballistic, people went bananas, riots all over the country about the “soon to be signed agreement”.
If you stopped all those people though and asked them: “Hey did you read the agreement? Why are you protesting?” The answer was “no” and all they knew they had “heard from” some blogs, news or their own echo chamber.
I did none of those stressful and counter-productive stuff.
I went to the ministry’s website. Downloaded the text. Print it. Read ALL of it. Actually informed myself and formed my own opinion on the matter. No news, no anxiety, no shouting.
The same thing happened in 2003 if I remember correctly where there were huge riots in universities when I was a student about a reform in the education laws. A lot of people where shouting things, talking crap or out of their minds about what was going to happen and what was in the new law.
I went to the ministry’s website. Downloaded the text. Print it. Read ALL of it. Actually informed myself and formed my own opinion on the matter. No news, no anxiety, no shouting.
Both times I realised that:
a) the news cherry-pick everything. Some out of bias and some because you cannot really print a 15 page manuscript in a newspaper and say “here have at it”
b) the public is lazy and doesn’t really care about what is actually true or not
c) most of the rioters where protesting about things that were not true 
d) other things that were much more serious and damaging and really worth rioting were overlooked and not mentioned at all.
We need to understand that this is the era of information. If we are really interested in something we do not need an intermediary to include their own bias, their own “opinion”, their own “view” or outsource them with the ability to pick what we need to “know about”. More often than not, we can go straight to the source and avoid all that.
By doing that we also avoid the non-sense about the meaningless news that Neil Postman warned in the “Amusing ourselves to death” book. The news moved away from what was actually useful, to what “sells” … but we do not have to follow them. Staying informed doesn’t need to be stressful or misleading
P.S.
I’ve noticed this “the media didn’t tell us this or that” trend growing more and more and it is very worrying … people are passing the buck to the news and shifting the blame of their own ignorance to other people. This is a very worrying behavior.
I think my mother at 72 is a lot fitter than my grandparents were when they were 60, and she still works (she enjoys it). Increased life expectency tends to also increase healthy years, although there are limits ofcourse. I don’t expect to see many 90 year-old climbing scaffolds in the forseeable future.
Anyway, I think the models of the CPB and similar institutions (I suppose they would qualify as “pencil shovers”) are more extensive than considering life expectancy alone, or even state pensions alone.
Committing to policies untenable in the long run will cause problems later on, and the longer such an problem is ignored or postponed, the worse it gets and the more painful the fix will be. Our government tends to be slow in implementing necessary policy changes, but better late than never, I guess.
Given our demographics and our pension system, not raising pension age would burden younger working people more and more. Our work force is currently about 10 million people and our pensioners are about 3 million people. Because of our aging population, this ratio will slowly grow worse for the working force. I’m convinced our increase in pension age was neccessary to keep providing for state pensions affordable for the work force for the foreseeable future (a couple of decades?).
Not all parties agreed with it though. IIRC these parties are against raising pension age:
SP
PVV
50plus
But those are mostly opposition parties, so they don’t have much responsibility to come up with realistic alternatives.
An obvious alternative would be to gradually lower state pensions, but that was not what they proposed IIRC.
Other solutions would be
What does a single example prove? My grandparents died at 79, 82, 86 and 104 but my father died at 61 before he could enjoy retirement. My mother retired at 65 but was tired of working several years before that and didn’t enjoy her work.
We live longer because modern medicine can treat diseases (like cancer) better. It doesn’t mean that we are otherwise in better shape.
They could, but our government parties usually don’t like to raise taxes (they are already high). And taxes would need to keep increasing as the demographic situation worsens.
The government does provide child benefits, parental leave and partial financing of daycare, but they can’t force people to have children. Any policy to encourage having children more should have started 20 years ago to have an effect now. Then again many people consider our country already overpopulated as it is.
Fair enough, I checked a different “pencil shoving” institution CBS to provide more solid data.
This page has remaining life expectancy (LE) and remaining healthy life expectancy (HLE) (self-reported good health): Gezonde levensverwachting; vanaf 1981
It shows that in the past 40 years, LE for 65 year-old men increased from 14 to 18.5 years (4.5 year increase), while HLE increased from 9 years to 12.5 years (3.5 year increase), for 65 year old women the LE increased from 19 to 21 years (2 year increase) and HLE increased from 11 to 13.5 years (2.5 year increase).
So HLE increase is not exactly equal to LE increase, but HLE increase is at least a significant portion of LE increase (on average, for the Dutch population).
This is what people seem to miss; there is (I assume) need for some kind of solution. I always feel this undertone that people believe [leader ‘X’, wherever it is] has a huge money pit stashed out behind parliament which they’re keeping for themselves out of greed, maliciousness or apathy.
Why would an intelligent leader (or government) of a sovereign nation, responsible for that nations long-term wellbeing, take actions which they know full well in advance will be highly unpopular? Because they believe it to be necessary. Even though they will be reviled, they do what they believe to be the highest overall good for their country. That’s someone who loves their country more than themselves, and is thinking further than a week into the future. Or someone who did their sums wrong I suppose.
I understand that some people don’t like the way it was pushed through, but suspect that there’s realistically no other way it’d get done.
It doesn’t mean that a 77.5 year-old man or a 78.5 year-old woman can still work. I mean, a certain level of activity is still possible at that age, but working full-time and being competitive on the job market compared to 25 year-olds is probably impossible for most people at that age.
So while the HLE is an interesting indicator, it doesn’t tell how many years we are able to work full-time.
See also this
It could be possible, I suppose, but personally I believe it only happens in movies and in paperbacks.
And my great-grand mother died at 105 and even at her final days she was going up and down the hill and tended to a small field she had. So what? @jlt is correct. One example is not useful for any argument and certainly not for creating national policy for everyone. Would you like to get a pension at 100 years old just because my great-grand mother had a fantastic health and was happily tilling the earth to the end? I highly doubt it 
No, the lawmakers qualify as such. The various statisticians and clerks just do their jobs and produce the daya. The lawmakers decide what to do and how to “process” that data and as far as they are concerned - here at least, do check for your own country - they get a lifelong pension if they are elected twice. For the citizens however they have “prerequisites” of age and days of work and yada yada.
Particularly funny is when we had a repeat election in 2012 (May and June) and - according to the law - all of those that were elected (practically the same people in both cases), qualified for the pension. Later, those same people SLASHED the pensions of the citizens again and again.
Cynical? Nah … simple true.
That is true, but it is a vicious cycle as I said earlier. Less bright future, less people willing to have children. More aging population, less bright future and so on and so on and so on…
Oh, I can think of one … connecting every pension to the pensions of the lawmakers … everytime people get shafted, they get shafted as well. Every time they give themselves a raise, everyone in the country gets one as well. You’d see how fast they would find the funds then.
The same for the salaries. Would they dare even propose such a thing? nope …
The question is why we are not - as voters - demanding such a fair idea to be implemented.
If anyone says that it cannot be done, I want to point out that it has been already implemented in our military (and since we are copying systems from elsewhere, this probably applies to many other militaries in the world). All salaries, even the top general, is a Fixed_Percentage*Salary_of_lieutenant.
When the general gets a raise, the lieutenants have to get a raise, so everyone gets a raise.
Even if you put a “healthy” tag in front of it, that does not mean that they can still do their jobs at 65-70.
Think for a minute, let’s say you are a builder at 60-65 or an electrician or a plumber or lorry driver and the company you work goes under and you are laid off. Who on earth would hire you?
Again, even for office work, you might be healthy enough to go there and even do cartwheels, but you are no longer efficient. Your mental faculty declines with age. And “not efficient” means “soon to be fired”. Why would a company pay more money for less work? (in RL: because the worker laws would demand to recompensate them generously, but rest assured you are burden they would get rid off gladly if they could)
And who on earth would re-hire you at 60-65?
Noone said that people do not live longer. The question is if they can manage/achieve/bear to work any longer.
True, but a totally different kind of solution would require a totally different kind of system. A total rebuild of how pension work. E.g. Japan has a much different system I think, but I have not checked it out in detail.
I have to point out that those people are rare in society in general and even rarer in elected positions.
In order to be a politician and be power-hungry to “gain a seat” and “self-centered” enough to honestly believe that “only you can do this job” and then run a campaign where you will do anything to win, a certain amount of ruthlessness is needed, that is hardly present in well-meaning people.
Well. That will be bad news for the “Over The Years” tournament.
