the debate between Jean-Philippe Tanguy (RN) and Agnès Verdier-Molinié (IFRAP)

This text corresponds to part of the transcription of the debate above. Click on the video to watch it in full.

Caroline Roux: I welcome Agnès Verdier-Molinié, director of the IFRAP Foundation, a liberal think tank. I quote your book, “Facing the wall, solutions to get out of it”, published by the Observatory. Good evening, thank you for agreeing to debate. We’re going to start talking about pensions.

Agnès Verdier-Molinié: Absolutely. A question arises. You are for reducing public spending, you have often said so. And at the same time, the best lever for reducing public spending is to raise the retirement age. And yet, you voted for the suspension of the pension reform. While ultimately, we are a country that retires early compared to other European countries. The average elsewhere in Europe is 65 years. We are going to be stuck at 62 years and 9 months. And in fact, we will further widen the deficit and the debt. You said it yourself, eventually. The cost is around 9 billion euros per year. And the Court of Auditors even says that if we are one year younger, we are around 7.8 billion. And if we are two years younger, that is to say 64 years which become 62 years, it is even worse, it is around 15 billion additional deficit in the coming years by 2032.

So the question I ask myself is: How can we be both in favor of reducing public spending and against pushing back the retirement age, knowing that we are missing 7 billion hours that are not worked in France because we work less than elsewhere, certainly because we start working later, this is the famous employment rate, but also because we retire earlier…?

Jean-Philippe Tanguy: Simply because I think that it does not reduce public spending. You know, since I became aware of politics, I only hear about parametric pension reforms and each time, the system redoes reform after reform after reform because in fact, the French system works poorly because of what you said, the employment rate. You said it, young French people enter the job market too late, but our elders are already leaving too early. They are excluded from the labor market, despite reforms. You remove, for example, civil servants who, obviously, or protected employment, which means that they leave later and later when the parametric reform makes them leave later, but in the private sector, in entire sectors like construction, industry, even executives, you know this very well, are pushed aside and are in fact either unemployed or in a very precarious situation, which means that it is a false economy.

But we also forget a lot of people, for example French people with disabilities. They are often excluded from the labor market. This represents hundreds of thousands of people who could be employed, who could create wealth and who are excluded from the labor market. Women too, often working part-time, who would like a full-time contract, are not fully employed either. So there is a lot of wealth in our country that could be created. I add that people who are forced to stay at work too long often have their bodies damaged and that has a cost on Social Security, on chronic illnesses, on depression, all these social costs, they exist. On paper, it seems to save money, but in reality and also in people’s lives, because the goal of politics is to keep accounts, you are right, but it is also for people to be happy, to be able to have happiness. However, today, working is difficult and I think that many of us who are privileged forget the difficulty of work.

This text corresponds to part of the transcription of the debate above. Click on the video to watch it in full.