This is where we are headed in the United States. In France, people on what is the equivalent of Social Security in the United States, the average retired person makes 2% more annually than the average working adult. Talk about unsustainable entitlement programs.
French retirees over the age of 65 now make more money relative to the average salary of working-age adults in the country, according to a Financial Times analysis of a recent Luxembourg Income Study. The average pensioner earned about €1,626 gross per month ($1,926) at the end of 2022, and currently earn around 2% more than working adults.
Fortune.com
To make matters worse, the retirees income is rising faster than those working for a living.
In the five decades between 1970 and 2020, the cumulative increase in median income for working-aged French citizens between the ages of 18 and 64 rose by about 100%, while it increased by more than 160% for the nation’s retirees.
Fortune.com
No matter how good that sounds to someone like me that turns 59 in a couple of months I know this is not good for our country.
The article compares retirees in France to retirees in the United States and paints the picture of people being worse off here. I don’t see it that way. A retirement system that weighted towards people not working is due for collapse. Ours is already at its breaking point.
What we need is more financial literacy and a Social Security system that actually creates a retirement account, from the moment a person starts earning a wage to the moment they retire, that is directly tied to the person and cannot be revised or taken away by the government. We need to gradually move to a privatized system rather than this pyramid scheme we have today.
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