Austerity, French-style (Raising the retirement age from 60 to 61)

A headline in the Wall Street Journal reports that "France Plans to Raise Retirement Age." This sounds like good news until you read further. The current retirement age in France is 60, and President Sarkozy has not specified how far he intends to raise it. The Journal guesses the new retirement age will be 62 or 63, while other reports suggest that 61 will be more palatable. The measure has already met stiff resistance from French labor unions, who brought out between 400,000 and a million protesters in major cities on May 28th. (As usual, crowd estimates vary widely.)

Even if Sakorzy succeeds with his "austerity measures," it is likely that France will remain below the OECD average, 63.5 for men and 62.3 for women. The French will still work as much as five years less than Germans, where the retirement age increased from 65 to 67 in 2007. Last week Italy raised its retirement age to 65 for both men and women.

Deutsche Welle comments:

Despite the theoretical minimum retirement age, the average retirement age in France is actually 58.7 years for men and 59.5 years for women...In addition, France has one of the world's longest life-expectancy rates, meaning French workers on average spend a quarter century in retirement.

How do you say "unsustainable" in French?

Retirement... what's that? My meager retirement savings have been decimated by the Obama stock market, the payments from my small annuity plan will likely be taxed to death and before I reach 67 Social Security and Medicare will be defunct or at least means tested so I won't get but a pittance. I plan to work until I drop dead or am too senile to do anything or until Obamacare Death Panels decide I am not worth saving and have me put down like an old dog. I should be so lucky as to live in France where I might get something at 61 at least until the country goes belly up like Greece.

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