Emmanuel Macron’s project to repel the retirement age at 65 is based in part on the desire to absorb the system deficit, but its detractors are based on the fact that the current system remains On a “controlled trajectory”.
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Analysis. Do pension plans face budgetary difficulties that require corrective measures? This apparently simple question has not received an obvious answer since Emmanuel Macron relaunched it by proposing to postpone the age of rights to a pension at 65. His initiative was at the origin of a debate which very quickly turned to the fire fair, making even more obscure a file already difficult to apprehend.
The fact that there is a controversy is logical given the object of the reform. The Head of State considers that it is necessary to “work longer”, which implies additional efforts largely disapproved. But one of the intriguing aspects of the controversy is the impossibility of achieving a common expression on the state of the system, even though the protagonists are based on the same data: in particular those provided by the Orientation Council pensions (Cor). Associate parliamentarians, union officials and employers, qualified personalities and representatives of the administration, this body, created in 2000, delivers “the elements of a shared diagnosis”, in a report made each year by a permanent group of experts , to which she gives her printer after discussion.
If the “elements” in question are generally consensus, their interpretation diverges. During the in-between-tours debate, Mr. Macron said, on April 20, that the system will be in deficit for just over ten years, citing the projections of “the independent organization which is called the Horn “. A few days earlier, Anne Hidalgo, her socialist rival in the running in the Elysée race, had also gave himself the work of this body, but to develop a diametrically opposite thesis: “There is no problem of financing “, she had assured.
Neither can be accused of manipulating what the Cor writes. He explains, in his last report, that there was a “hole” of 13 billion euros in 2020 in the pension funds. According to him, the return to balance would not intervene before the first half of the 2030s, in the most favorable scenario. It is on the basis of these predictions that the President of the Republic considers it essential to act and make savings, by repulsive the legal retirement age.
The head of state’s contradictors plead for a different approach justified, according to them, by the horn itself. The latter explains, in fact, that to carry out “an economic reading of the financial situation of pensions” it is better to look at not the balance between spending and revenue, but another indicator: the share of pensions in national wealth. After having cried at 14.7 % of GDP in 2020, this ratio should reflect, to oscillate between 11.3 % and 13 % “by 2070”, according to the hypotheses chosen. The horn concludes that the device would remain “on a controlled trajectory”. An appreciation on which Anne Hidalgo relies, to claim – with others (unions, economists …) – that there is no danger in the house.
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