“We will come back to this unfair pension reform,” Thomas Ménage, spokesperson for the National Rally, insisted on BFMTV after the European elections on June 9. A reform passed by forceps in 2023, with high political costs, but far from having resolved the subject of financing our pension system. The report from the Pension Orientation Council noted a surplus in 2023 but anticipates a return to a deficit next year. “This deterioration would continue over the entire projection period to reach -0.4% of GDP in 2030 and -0.8% of GDP in 2070,” he adds. More pessimistic figures than last year’s forecasts.
But for Nicolas Marques, the director of the Molinari Institute, the situation is much more worrying. The arrival at the presidency of the economist Gilbert Ce in place of Pierre-Louis Bras has not changed anything, the COR figures continue to ignore a fundamental parameter and the deficit would in reality reach 53 billion euros. Explanations.
L’Express: The COR officially publishes its report on June 13 with some adjustments compared to the previous edition, in response to criticism. What do you think ?
Nicolas Marques: These changes are marginal. Certainly, the projections are more realistic, the report is more concise, clearer, and that is very good. But the real important subject has not changed, namely the picture at time T of the deficit, which means that the COR projections are meaningless. The calculation of the balance of the pension system remains baroque, based on the principle that everything that is the responsibility of the State is in balance and that if there is a deficit, it is the responsibility of the private sector. For 2023, the COR this time advances a surplus of 3.8 billion euros for 2023, thanks to Agirc-Arrco. In reality, the deficit linked to pensions, when calculated correctly, amounted to 53 billion euros last year, because the balancing subsidies paid to public sector pensions represented 56 billion last year.
What does this figure correspond to?
This is the amount of additional contributions paid by the State to balance the retirement system of civil servants – State agents, territorial and hospital civil service, special schemes of the SNCF or RATP, civil servants seconded from La Poste or of Orange… Not taking them into account means that the entire COR photo is incorrect.
Since 2002, its reports simply assert that the public sector is balanced by the state. This could be correct if we were in Switzerland or Denmark, where the public accounts are not in deficit. In France, this makes no sense – the last balanced accounts date back to 1980. The French state has been structurally in deficit since the end of the baby boom, because the country has not put enough aside to finance the pensions and there are no longer enough assets. Starting with civil servants, with a ratio of 0.9 contributors per retiree. The primary expenditure for National Education is pensions: 30% of the budget. In the police and justice, the orders of magnitude are the same, around 28%. The cost of the past is enormous.
It was nevertheless welcome to revise downwards the productivity assumptions underlying COR projections?
Between what Gilbert Cet thought he was doing and what he negotiated with the unions, there is a gap. But this is consubstantial with COR: once a bad habit is formed, it is very difficult to change it. In any case, the fact that the projection hypotheses have evolved marginally remains anecdotal since the starting base is false. The real tragedy is that there are solutions. But hiding the problem does not allow us to take action.
Why this lack of transparency?
What I denounce about the real scale of the deficit, all the big financiers in France are aware of it. Above all, they hoped to get rid of the subject, by switching to the universal regime. This opacity also suits public service unions who want to save their particularities. For me, this is an error: civil servants would be much better protected if pensions were funded.
What do you recommend?
The State must gradually go into debt over thirty years, to build up a fund and then be able to self-finance civil servants’ pensions with the interest and dividends from this fund. The Senate and the Bank of France are already doing this successfully. The Bank of France has even returned 2.6 billion euros to the State since 2020. If they were funded by capitalization, pensions would cost taxpayers much less.
The advantage of a State is to be able to borrow at a low cost and over the long term. Elsewhere in the world, certain countries understood in the 1990s that they were heading into trouble and took the necessary decisions. In Canada, for example, provisions have been made for around thirty years. We could very well start to provision massively through debt, this would be a very good opportunity. It’s the best investment you can make in France.
The RN, for its part, is mainly considering returning to the 2023 pension reform, even if Jordan Bardella recently postponed a possible repeal of this text.
To think that we could raise the retirement age in a country which has focused everything on distribution is an illusion. The underdevelopment of retirement savings generates a shortfall of 80 billion euros per year, corresponding to the capital gains and dividends that we would collect if we had been as far-sighted as other developed countries. In this context, the only lever is to make the French work longer.
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