Franceses irresponsaveis: querem continuar gastando e trabalhando pouco

Os franceses, como é seu hábito semanal (ou a cada vez que o governo fala em reformas), fizeram greve contra o projeto do governo de elevar a idade mínima da aposentadoria de 60 anos a 62 em 2018 (!!!!). Claro, os que fizeram greve são em geral funcionários públicos, como também aconteceria no Brasil se a medida (mais do que necessária) fosse votada.
É inacreditável. Os franceses (mas os brasileiros também entram na mesma irracionalidade) estão fazendo greve contra si mesmos, não contra o governo. Eles protestam, de maneira particularmente estúpida, contra a aritmética e contra a demografia, dois fenômenos que passam longe da capacidade do governo de exercer qualquer influência.
A demografia diz que cada vez haverá mais velhos inativos, e menos jovens ativos, para sustentar os pagamentos das pensões e aposentadorias.
A aritmética diz que, nessas circunstâncias, ou você aumenta o volume de contribuições ou você diminui as prestações, pois as contas simplesmente não fecham.
Como as pessoas estão vivendo cada vez mais, e melhor -- inclusive causando novos gastos, terríveis de suportar, sobre os sistemas públicos de saúde -- a lógica diria que, sim, as pessoas têm de trabalhar mais e contribuir mais tempo, se quiserem desfrutar de aposentadorias e pensões razoáveis.
A menos, claro, que do alto de sua irresponsabilidade, elas queiram deixar a conta para seus filhos e netos, e quebrar o sistema antes do tempo.
Não entendo como pessoas racionais podem lutar contra a demografia e a aritmética.
A menos que elas não sejam racionais, claro.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

France's public finances
How buoyant is France?
The Economist, June 17th, 2010

The French government is slowly starting to tackle the country’s economic problems. But austerity remains a dirty word

Paris - ONE by one, euro-zone governments have been confecting austerity plans in a bid to reassure jumpy bond markets. After Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy, last week even creditworthy Germany unveiled a savings plan. Britain, although not in the euro zone, is braced for fiscal tightening in an emergency budget on June 22nd. The only big European economy yet to spell out an austerity plan is France—a country badly in need of one.

The government thinks it has a scheme to get the public finances under control. On June 16th it unveiled its long-awaited pension reform, which will raise the legal retirement age from 60 to 62 by 2018. Since this will meet less than half the €45 billion ($55 billion) state pension-fund shortfall by 2020, next year the top rate of income tax will be raised from 40% to 41%, and taxes on financial transactions will increase. By 2020 civil servants’ pension contributions will increase from 8.1% of pay to 10.5%.

The plan sends a reasonably serious message about France’s long-run resolve, although it will be resisted. Martine Aubry, the opposition Socialist leader, herself nearly 60, vowed to reverse the retirement-age rise if elected. The unions have called for protests on June 24th. In budgetary terms, however, the short-run impact of the measures will be limited. Even in the long run the reform will leave France with a younger retirement age than Greece.

The French have made other noises about spending cuts. Just days after Germany’s Angela Merkel announced her austerity plan, worth €80 billion by 2014, François Fillon, France’s prime minister, appeared to trump it by announcing €100 billion of savings by 2013. Yet there was nothing new here: he was merely quoting the saving needed to meet France’s promise, under euro-zone rules, to curb its deficit from 8% of GDP this year to 3% by 2013.

Moreover, Mr Fillon claimed cheerily that economic growth would do half the repair work. That leaves €50 billion to be found in cuts. He hopes to squeeze €5 billion by trimming tax exemptions, and says he will freeze the 2011 budget in real terms. Small savings will come from an old plan to replace only one in two retiring civil servants, and he says he will stop ministers claiming a salary and pension at the same time. But the rest is unspecified. “France for the moment stands out as the only country that has not spelled out how it will reduce its deficit,” notes Laurence Boone, an economist at Barclays Capital in Paris.

Why? A generous explanation is that France is doubtful about the wisdom of premature fiscal tightening. Before Mrs Merkel produced her cuts, Christine Lagarde, the finance minister, had accused Germany of not doing enough to stimulate demand. Another minister says an austerity plan would risk “killing off growth”. Mr Fillon himself has said that France is “far from an austerity plan”.

A more plausible reason is that the government is too nervous to tell voters about the need for deep spending cuts, let alone implement them two years before a presidential election. The French word for austerity, rigueur, remains taboo on both left and right. It is linked in the public mind to the painful austerity drive introduced by President François Mitterrand in 1983, after his “rupture with capitalism” had sunk the currency and built up a crushing deficit.

Politicians are haunted too by the fate of Alain Juppé, a prime minister on the right, who tried to reform France’s welfare and pensions in 1995. Strikes paralysed the country for weeks; Mr Juppé backed down and his government was booted out at the next election. With over 5m people, or nearly one in five of the labour force, working for the state, any squeeze on public-sector pay or benefits can draw crowds on to the streets. Although Nicolas Sarkozy was elected on a promise to shake things up, the recession has tempered his liberalising zeal. Pension reform aside, he appears more focused on keeping a lid on social discontent ahead of 2012.

The trouble is that economic reality demands tough measures. “We are closer to Greece than to Germany,” says Nicolas Baverez, a commentator who has long warned the government about its public finances. France’s budget deficit this year is forecast at 8% of GDP, next to 9% in Greece (see chart), and its deficit-cutting plans rely on optimistic growth forecasts. Its public debt, at 84%, is worryingly high. Moreover, Mr Sarkozy has a tendency to spend his way out of trouble. The French government spends 56% of GDP, more than any other euro-zone country. As the national auditor pointed out recently, a quarter of the increase in the deficit in 2009 was unrelated to the recession.

For the time being, the credit agencies continue to give French sovereign debt a top rating, enabling it to borrow cheaply. France has a big, diversified economy, and worries about debt in the euro-zone periphery have drawn investors to the perceived haven of French bonds. Yet the spread over German bonds has widened recently, and in February Moody’s, a rating agency, warned that in the absence of consolidation, rising debt could threaten France’s AAA rating. François Baroin, the budget minister, admitted that the objective of preserving France’s rating was tendu, which means “tight” or “stretched” (although he later insisted he intended it to mean “constant” or “unbending”).

The real difficulty is credibility. Mr Sarkozy says he wants to write a rule into the constitution to commit governments to reducing the deficit, something Germany has done. But this could take time, and it is unclear how binding it would be. The harsh truth is that no French government has balanced its budget since the early 1970s. As Jacques Delpla, an economist on the Council of Economic Analysis, points out, French governments have lived beyond their means even during the years of plenty—a failure he calls “scandalous”.