The French and the barbarians

The world news (that is, the world outside the American media circus) is agog over the proposal to raise the retirement age in France from 60 to 62—over the next eight years.

Let's pause and contrast this with the United States. Here, the official retirement age (that is, the age at which once can claim full retirement benefits) has risen to 66 for those people not already above 65. This happened some years ago, and the change seems to have got past nearly everyone under age 55. Most of them still think it's 65.

The next step was supposed to be raising the retirement age to 67 and performing the minor tweaks that would fix the Social Security deficit that would otherwise become a concern around, oh, my 95th birthday, if I'm unlucky enough to have one. The Republicans and the teabags, having fallen intro the trap of believing their own rhetoric, are instead saying, "oh hell, why don't we just shut down Social Security now, totally, and Medicare while we're at it. And screw the unemployed into the bargain." It's troubling to observe that our supposedly socialist administration seems to think all this is a good idea.

Oh, and if you're of a mind to grunt and say "fine, let them work," remember that they (we) can't. That is, many of us can't. Because while all of this is going down, the de facto retirement age* in the US has slipped under 50. So, as of this writing, when you lose your job at 45 or 50 you won't get either the unemployment benefits or Social Security that you worked for, or Medicare, or another job. Best bet is to hang onto whatever cardboard, blankets and and camping gear you may have, and steal a shopping cart to tote it in. If you then learn the fine art of dumpster diving and travel in packs, you may be able to last a few months after you blow through whatever money you had left after Wall Street pissed away the rest.

Although France may raise the retirement age by two years over the next eight, they still plan to see that their older citizens have some means of support. This is considerably more compassionate than the emerging American "plan," which seems to be no plan at all.

Mary Renault wrote that in Doric Greece, residents who, through bad planning or bad luck, lived to the age of 60 were expected to go up in the hills and do away with themselves. We used to consider this barbarism. Now we call it deficit reduction.

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*The de facto retirement age comes when employers have at least ten excuses for not hiring you for every year of experience you can offer.

SSDD

Parade magazine, that bastion of all that is wonderful in America, tells us this weekend of a Georgia (where else?) programme that would oblige the unemployed to work for their benefits. The magazine's online poll currently shows that readers agree with the idea by a margin of 57 to 43 percent. As of Monday, the neanderthals who support the idea are getting some sharp pushback from unemployed professionals who, like, me, think it's idiotic.

It's a perfect conservative concept. The employer pays unemployment compensation insurance, which in theory is supposed to provide a disincentive to layoffs as well as a fund to keep unemployed workers contributing to the economy with such extravagances as food, rent and job hunting expenses.

Well hell, that worked well, didn't it?

Georgia's plan would still have employers pay the insurance that isn't enough to make mass layoffs too costly an option for regular use. Then, they get to have the same workers back for nothing and with no commitment to hire them back. The idea of course is the old canard that all unemployed workers are out of work because they are shiftless bums.

The numbers show who really benefits. Turning Parade's trumpeting around, one notes that nearly half the unemployed under this plan are still unemployed. How many employers do we think will take advantage, indefinitely, of workers that they do not have to pay?

Suppose we try an alternative that has made sense to me for nearly 40 years. Have employers pay unemployment insurance that makes layoffs save at the last extremity a ruinously expensive proposition. Give them a refund if they rehire these workers (layoff originally implied laying back on). Give them another credit for hiring people who are on unemployment. Make them say why they haven't taken advantage of these benefits.

Georgia's plan used to be called serfdom, and the label still fits.