#pensiones sociales

[mysharona1987]

The French really don’t fuck around.

[the-bibrarian]

I see a lot of incomprehension online about our pension reform and the anger it generates in France, and what it often boils down to is "why are they so angry, 64 is plenty young to retire?"

I don't agree, but even if I did I would still oppose the reform. Here are some of the reasons why:

We already need 43 full years of work and tax contributions to be able to retire. Which means college-educated people were never going to retire at 64 anyway, let alone 62. This reform is aimed at people who start working early, mostly in low-paying jobs.

There's very little provision made in this law for hard/dangerous/manual labour.

There's no provision made for women who stop working to raise their children (51% of women already retire without a "complete career," which means they only retire on a partial pension, vs. 25% of men).

At 64, 1/3 of the poorest workers will already be dead. In France, between the richest and the poorest men, there's a 13 years gap in life expectancy.

Beyond life expectancy, at that age a lot of people (especially poorer, non-college educated) have too many health-related issues to be able to work. Not only is it cruel to ask them to work longer, if they can't work at all that's two more years to hold on with no pension

Unemployment in France is still fairly high (7%). Young people already have a hard time finding work, and this is going to make things even harder for them

Macron cut taxes on the rich and lost the country around 16 Billions € in tax revenue. Our estimated pension deficit should peak at 12 Billions worst case scenario.

While I'm on wealth redistribution (no, not soviet style, but I think there should be a cap on wealth concentration. Nobody needs to be a billionaire.): some of the massive profits of last year should go to workers and to the state to be redistributed, including to fund pensions. The state subsidized companies and corporations during the pandemic, Macron even said "no matter the cost" and spent 206 Billions € on businesses. Now he's going after the poorest workers in the country for an hypothetical 12 Billions??

Implicit in all of this is the question of systemic racism. French workers from immigrant families are already more likely to have started their careers early, to have low-paying jobs, are less likely to be college-educated, more at risk for disabilities and chronic illnesses, etc., so this is going to disproportionately affect them

This is not even touching on the fact that he didn't let lawmakers vote on it, meaning he knew he wouldn't get a majority of votes in parliament, or that 70% of the population is against this law. Pushing it through anyway is blatant authoritarianism.

TL;DR: This is only tangentially about retirement age. The reform will make life harder for people with low incomes, or with no higher education, for manual workers, for women—mothers especially, for POC, for people with disabilities or chronic conditions, etc. This is about solidarity.

Hope (sincerely) this helps.

[alwaysbewoke]

[whinlatter]

That brings up an interesting point. Since you seen to be a canon girlie, do you think/feel that Hermione DOES become Minister?

What do you make of Harry being Head of Magical Law Enforcement?

thank you for this question anon! i do think it's very plausible hermione becomes minister of magic. i think it's equally plausible that harry becomes head of magical law enforcement. mostly because, well:

basically: i think both characters' career trajectories are in keeping with the politics of the series as a whole - eg. the goodies are all liberal, pro-state, non-revolutionary moderates who support a gradualist reformist agenda rather than a radical re-imagining of societal organisation. i also think both career options track with who each character is in canon (or rather, who the teenage versions of these characters might become as adults). and i think most of the reasons people are disappointed by either idea, and especially by harry coming 'a cop' then rising up the ranks to run law enforcement, is because they are putting their own more radical ambitions around social justice onto characters that would be poor vehicles for them.

on hermione - i don't know how many people have huge issue with the idea of hermione as minister of magic. i imagine the complaints with this idea come from people who a) like hermione and think hermione's politics as a teenager - identifying systemic injustice and labour exploitation of a subject people - jar with the idea of her settling within a political system that upholds and enforces that structure and others like it, or b) people don't like hermione as much and who think she would be too unpopular to get elected. to the former group, i'd trot out the arguments made far better than people other than me: that hermione's support for the house elves mostly boils down to a bit of a saviour complex and 'be nicer to your slaves', which is not especially radical position, and also point out the ministry's institutional culture seems to reward high-achieving technocrats with establishment credentials (or at least, prior records of academic and professional achievement), and i could see hermione riding that train straight to the top, especially on wave of post-war reformism with diminishing anti-muggleborn prejudice. (the wizarding world also loves a good (and bad) law and is extremely vigilant in enforcing them to a fault. hermione jean granger absolutely loves a rule. it's a match-made in heaven. it is - i fear - giving keir starmer).

to the second point, as i talked a bit about here, the wizarding world does not seem to be a democracy. so hermione wouldn't even need to be especially popular to get the top job. i personally love the idea of hermione quietly parking her commitments to representative democracy to get a bit of good labour legislation passed, or even thinking about wizarding democracy in victorian terms (as long as you're representing what you think the enlightened citizenry want, you're gucci). i mean honestly, what do the masses know! ignore em, queen. they're all kind of pureblood racists anyway!

on harry: i have a feeling it's harry's trajectory that most pisses people off. and i absolutely get it! people hate cops, and harry appears to become one, after spending a lot of the series raging against how shit senior leadership at the ministry of magic tend to be. while i do see the argument that teenage harry has strong criticisms of the ministry for its officials' self-interest, corruption and lack of accountability for their many miscarriages of justice, the truth is that a) harry never really associates being an auror with representing the ministry of magic as an institution, that b) he thinks of lots of characters who work in and around the ministry of magic, including in law enforcement, as agents of good (arthur weasley, kingsley, tonks, mad-eye, amelia bones) and c) harry at no point shows himself interested in thinking about ideology, about political systems, or about a more developed worldview beyond a deep sense of right and wrong and a need for justice. i think harry would like being head of magical law enforcement much less than hermione would like being minister, and i could see him finding the job enormously frustrating both for how much politicking it likely requires and for how little field action it would require. but i don't think that means it's out of character for him to rise up the ranks in pursuit of a more effective justice system and eventually take the top job as a means to an end.

the only other thing i'll say is that i do think there is something a bit culturally specific about imagining these two characters we think of as morally good actors taking up roles within the state to try to work for what they feel to be positive reform and progressive causes. the state appears quite neutrally in the hp series: it's a tool to be picked up and used to affect political change. this reflects its author's worldview, the political moment in which it was written (eg. under blair's new labour), and a longstanding dimension of real-life centre-left social democratic british politics usually expressed, at various times and to varying extents, by the political programme of the labour party throughout its history (to say nothing of a wider european context). it's not an inherently problematic political worldview (it is a core social democratic and socialist principle; it is also my own view of the state...), though ofc it can become so in the wrong hands. for instance, it's a consistent through-line in jkr's political evolution and a staple of her practically single-issue dangerous anti-trans politics even now - terf politics is a lot about wielding the state to remove legal protections from trans people, stop them from accessing health care etc. but the idea of the big state and of laws and government as a positive interventionist tool does colour hp as a text in lots of ways and is reflected in the worldview of many of its characters with which the reader is supposed to side. and i don't think we should overlook that.

conversely, hp is also a series devoid of political movements, and certainly of a meaningful far-left ideology or political sphere. and that's important to remember too if we're interested in canon coherence: hp is a liberal text in that it seemed plausible for its author to vacate a great deal of politics from her world-building. and i think that is, regretfully, worth remembering when we're claiming hermione should have been a trade union agitator or harry should have been an acab abolitionist organiser or whatever.

[b0bthebuilder35]

Thoughts?

[thoughtportal]

401k and wealth transfer to the rich from the middle class

[blackswaneuroparedux]

οὐ γὰρ ἔστιν ἔπαλξις πλούτου πρὸς κόρον ἀνδρὶ λακτίσαντι μέγαν Δίκας βωμὸν εἰς ἀφάνειαν*

- Aeschylus

Riches are no defence for a man who has insolently trampled underfoot the altar of Justice until it disappears.*

Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock. The main instigator behind the ESG fad with his much derided annual ‘CEO’s Letter.’

[terrorbirb]

I'm now doing a perfect job at work :) senior engineers found no problems with my work :) I know this was only two projects, but this has been my goal for 3-4 months and I'm finally there.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Here are just two of the corporate giveaways hidden in the rushed, must-pass, end-of-year budget bill

Yesterday, Congress finally voted through the must-pass, end-of-year budget bill. As has become routine, this bill was stalled right until the final moment, so that Congressjerks could cram the 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion package with special favors for their donors, at the expense of the rest of the country.

This year’s budget package included a couple of especially egregious doozies, which were reported out for The American Prospect by Lee Harris (who covered a grotesque retirement giveaway for the ultra-rich) and Doraj Facundo (who covered a safety giveaway to Boeing and its lethal fleet of 737 Max airplanes).

Let’s start with the retirement scam. The budget bill includes Rep Richie Neal’s [DINO-MA] SECURE Act 2.0, which gives savers with retirement funds until age 75 to cash out their retirement savings — netting an extra three years of tax-free growth for the lucky, tiny minority with substantial retirement savings. This follows on Neal’s SECURE Act 1.0 of 2019, when the age was raised from 70.5 to 72.

The tax-exempt retirement savings account is a Carter-era bargain that replaced real pensions — ones that guaranteed that you wouldn’t starve or freeze to death when you retired — with accounts that let people gamble on the stock market, to be the suckers at Wall Street’s poker table:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

The market-based gambler’s pension is a catastrophic failure. Half of Americans have no retirement savings. Of the half that have any savings, the vast majority have almost nothing saved:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Retirement_Accounts;demographic:all;population:all;units:have

All in all, America has a $7 trillion retirement savings shortfall:

https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/IB_19-16.pdf

But for a tiny minority of the ultra-rich, tax-free savings accounts like ROTH IRAs are a means of avoiding even the paltry capital gains tax that you have to pay if you own things for a living, rather than doing things for a living. Propublica’s IRS Files revealed how ghouls like Peter Thiel avoided tax on billions in “passive income” by abusing tax-free savings accounts that were supposed to benefit the “middle class”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#thiels-gambit

Meanwhile, Social Security is crumbling, thanks to a sustained attack on it by the business lobby and its friends in both parties. Progressive Dems had sought to amend SECURE Act 2.0 by inserting some clauses to shore up Social Security, and none of these were included in the final bill.

One of the fixes that died was the Savings Penalty Elimination Act, introduced by Senators Sherrod Brown [D-OH] and Rob Portman [R-OH]. This act would have tweaked the means-testing for Supplemental Security Income, which supports 8m low-income disabled adults and kids. Right now, you can’t collect SSI if you have $2k in the bank, a limit that hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since the 1980s (adjusted for inflation, $2k in 1980 is $7226.00 in 2022).

The $2k savings cap means that you have to be substantially below the poverty level to receive $585/month in SSI assistance — this being the only source of income for the majority of SSI recipients. Means-testing is a self-immolating fetish for corporate Dems and in retrospect, this betrayal seems inevitable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/03/utopia-of-rules/#in-triplicate

(Notice how no one proposes means-testing billionaires when they get PPP loans or hundreds of millions in IRS “refunds” — like Trump, who paid substantially less tax than you did:)

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/21/trump-income-tax-returns-detailed-in-new-report-.html

And it was a betrayal: progressive Dems bargained with Neal and co not to publicly condemn SECURE Act 2.0 if they could get some concessions for the 8 million poorest disabled people in America. In the end, Neal rug-pulled them. Of course he did! This is Richie Fucking Neal, the best friend the Trump tax giveaway ever had:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/13/youre-still-the-product/#richie-neal

As with everything Neal touches, this screws poor people in multiple ways. First, it leaves the SSI cap intact. But it also creates a giant unfunded liability in the federal budget. Technically, there’s no reason this should lead to cuts. The US Treasury can’t run out of dollars, and giveaways to the rich are only mildly inflationary, since rich people put their money in the bank and mostly spend it on buying politicians, not goods.

But because of the delusion that currency producers like the US Treasury have the same constraints as currency users like you and me, Congress will need to come up with “Pay Fors” in future budgets to “make up for” the money they’re giving to rich people with SECURE Act 2.0. Dollars to toenail clippings, they’ll do that by hacking away at the tattered remains of the US social safety net.

Fear not, you don’t need to be a desperately poor disabled person or child to get fucked over by late additions to a 4,000 page must-pass bill! If you can afford to get on an airplane, Congress has something for you, too!

Remember when Boeing (the monopoly US airplane manufacturer that squandered $43b on stock buybacks and had to borrow $14b from the US public to survive the pandemic) told the FAA that it could self-certify its 737 Max airplanes, and then killed hundreds and hundreds of people with its defective planes?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#boeing

The 737 Max was unsafe for many reasons, but one glaring factor was the fact that Boeing sold some of its core safety as “extras” — like they were downloadable content for your Fortnite character — leading to multiple crashes in which all lives were lost:

https://apnews.com/article/ethiopia-indonesia-accidents-ap-top-news-international-news-140576a8e9d4449eae646c8c479fdc3a

Boeing was forced to take the 737 Max out of service, but it eventually brought the plane back, “fixing” the problems by renaming the “737 Max” to the “737 8”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/20/dubious-quantitative-residue/#737-8

Supposedly, Boeing has been diligently working on fixing the problems with its defective jets that can’t be addressed by a rebranding campaign. This wasn’t voluntary: the 2020 Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act required Boeing — and every other manufacturer whose aircraft were certified by the FAA — to meet new minimum safety standards by December 27, 2022.

Every manufacturer met that deadline, except Boeing, and someone amended the budget bill to give the company three more years to meet these security standards. Critically, the new security measures, when they come, will be certified by an FAA that Republicans will control, thanks to the House changing hands.

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/government-spending-bill-waives-aircraft-safety-deadline/

Boeing is slated to ship 1,000 new 737 Maxes, which will fetch $50b for the company. Many of these planes will fly directly over my house, which is on the approach path for Burbank airport. Southwest Air flies dozens of 737 Maxes right over my roof every single day.

As Facundo points out, the FAA can ill afford any more hits to its credibility. It was once the case that if the FAA certified an aircraft, every other country in the world would waive any further certification, so trusting were they of the FAA’s judgment. That is no longer the case: today, the European Aviation Safety Agency does its own aircraft testing, holding jets that enter EU airspace to a higher standard than the FAA does for US planes.

It’s just another reminder that the US doesn’t have “corporate criminals” because the US doesn’t have any meaningful enforcement for corporate crimes. In America, we love our companies like we love our billionaires: too big to fail and too big to jail:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card

Image: Ryan Lee (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/190784293@N05/50862532686

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Henry Wadey (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flames_%2858765896%29.jpeg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A living room scene, featuring a sofa in the background and a sofa in the foreground. A man's hand reaches into the frame to lift up the corner of the sofa. A broom enters the frame to sweep a pile of dirt under the rug. Mixed in with the dirt are a crashed WWI biplane with Southwest Airlines livery, and an old lady in a rocking chair.]

[q-kanbas]

Well I've accepted a job offer

[the-bibrarian]

“The EU average stands at 64.3 years for men and 63.5 years for women. In France, the current retirement age is 64.5 years for both men and women, according to the OECD dataset. This means that France has a slightly higher retirement age than the EU average.”

Source : euronews.com

The absolute fucking irony

[eaglesnick]

“After your older, two things are possibly more important than any others: Health and money.”  Helen Gurley Brown

The hot air around the state pension, the triple lock, and affordability continues. And is all a smoke screen for the fact that Britain has one of the lowest state pensions in the OECD.

Last year we had this headline:

State pension triple lock ‘utterly unaffordable’ and will 'bankrupt UK', Tory MP declares."  (Mirror: 21/11/22)

Yesterday we had:

“Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride admits triple lock is 'not sustainable’ in the long-term."  (itvx: 12/09/23)

And

“Treasury officials are discussing a one-off break from the pensions triple lock that could save £1bn by preventing a bumper 8.5% increase in the state pension next year."  (Guardian: 12/09/23)

You would think the government was literally giving away money to pensioners if you took the right-wing press and Tory politicians seriously. (Starmer is no better)  The truth is very different.

In 2018 it was reported that the UK had:

“He lowest pension rate in the developed world… pensioners in the United Kingdom suffer from the worst deal of any OECD country, receiving just 29% of a working wage when they retire. To put this into perspective, the OECD average is 63% and the average for EU member states is 71%. Elsewhere, the pension rate in the United States is 49%, while in China, which is home to more than 1.4 billion people, the rate is 83%, OECD data shows."  (weforum.org:23/02/18)

That was five years ago. Little has changed since then.

“The UK spends very little on state pensions compared to other European countries and has the highest percentage of pensioners in poverty, despite tax reliefs on workplace and private pensions,… The UK government only spends 4.7% of GDP on state pensions, much less than many other countries in Europe."  (Trustnet:10/11/22)

So next time you see a politician wringing their hands and sadly bemoaning the fact that the triple lock for pensioners is unaffordable know that the tears shed are of the crocodile variety and nothing could be further from the truth.

[janiedean]

nothing says getting old like continuously sending swears to the idiocy that is the italian pension system in this essay i will -

[princetonarchives]

On December 1, 1936, John D. Sweeney, who had just graduated from Princeton University that year, was named "Pensioner No. 1" in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's new social security program for the elderly. In 42 years, he would be eligible for the $85 per month pension. (Unfortunately for Sweeney, his untimely death in 1974 at the age of 61 meant he would never actually receive social security benefits, though his widow collected benefits based on his work until 1982.)

[fishmech]

sometimes you see a fundraiser and its for executing on a plan that is definitely going to at best worsen a person's situation extensively and at worst it's gonna get them killed because they do not understand the problems they're gonna run into doing that move they want to make.

but what are you going to do about it, message them? they're already convinced it's a bit late for that lol.

[kneedeepincynade]

The shaoshan collective shows its full Solidarity with our comrades in France, Macron will not win! Don't stop until the bourgeoisie have fallen!