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French presidential hopeful Melenchon pledges minimum wage rise, retirement at 60
(www.straitstimes.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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Seriously though, there are not enough young people for the masses of pensioners we get.
I'm sure if we are creative we will find a way to add more money to the system (i.e. not just funding via the current contribution system)
spoiler
Take money from the richThe rich don't own nearly enough. The retired people own most of the wealth in most western countries. Cap wealth at a million euros, not a billion, if you want to fix things.
Can you help me understand how you came to this conclusion (retired own more wealth than the rich)?
Not enough for what?
Pensioners and children (both don't work) don't eat bank notes. Working people's labour creates the food they eat, the buildings they sleep in, the healthcare and education they receive. Today theres significantly fewer working people doing that labour relative to non-working people compared to 50 years ago. Yet their labour appears to still be almost enough to take care of the pensioners, the children and the metastasizing 1%. How could this be? Why hasn't the standard of living utterly collapsed for any of these groups? Why are the 1% living better than ever? It's due to productivity gains. It takes fewer farmers along with machines to produce the same food as 70 years ago. It takes fewer tool and die makers to create the tooling for manufacturing any physical product. It takes fewer people to create the ssme number of school books. Build housing, etc. We need less working people labour to create the same stuff that we used to make 70 years ago. Conversely we can make more stuff with the same labour. This is why we can still support all three non-working groups while having fewer working people relative to non-working people than 70 years ago. There's no inherent impossibility. There is however one of those groups whose consumption has been rising dramatically, and it's not the pensioners or the children. The distribution of working people's labour is a choice. Children will become working people, and then at some point they'll become non-working pensioners. So there's inherent solidarity between children and old people.