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What is happening in France is really quite amazing -- and a lesson to us Americans what happens when socialism -- Obamunism runs out of control. The French are rioting about having the retirement age raised from 60 to 62. For us Americans, this is really a joke: most of us cannot even dream of retiring at 62 and nor would we really want to. Why go live in one of God's waiting rooms with others who have also given up? The full pay retirement age would go up from 65 to 67. In the meantime, since 1970, the average age expectancy went from just over 70 years for men to over 80. Essentially, that means funding another 10 years of retirement, part of which is going to be extremely medical-intensive. Expensive.

But, the French are different in that regard, they tend to be more active and pursue their hobbies and things like that, whereas Americans maybe play golf or fish. Cards? But the real point is that with modern medicine that means about 20 years of living off of pension money. And in the French case, that means a long time with full health care, mostly generous benefits, more or less full pay after you consider that working expenses are eliminated ... this is simply unsustainable. They do not produce enough in their working lives to justify this and France cannot afford it. With a dropping birthrate in France -- at least among those who actually work and produce goods and services, as opposed to the great unwashed and veiled in the city suburbs -- there is no way to support this system.

This brings me to the mystery of the Euro. It can't be good value. Germany cannot support the whole underfunded and overspending mess. France is up to its nose in debt, and it looks VERY good compared to the PIGS. But confidence there is much higher (why not... it takes that same sort of disassociation from reality to believe that they can afford their pension schemes), so the Euro sails on blithely. As an aside, with Merkel coming out and describing the failure of multi-culturalism, I would not be surprised to see Germany do something extraordinary like pulling out of the Euro unilaterally.

And now to the United States. Up to 100 Democrat congressional seats are now in play according to relatively neutral pollsters. And spending IS the issue. Almost everyone that will vote an incumbent / democrat out knows that the goal is to cut spending and that people are going to get "hurt." It is not that these people are "haters" or evil people, it is that (perhaps the small majority of) Americans know that you have to pay for what you get. Europeans have completely forgotten this -- except for the Germans.

There is no magical solution that will make everyone happy, that will provide for everyone equally. America is not the land where opportunity is thrown in your lap, it is the land where you can seek opportunity without relation to birth status, color or gender. More so that ANY other country on Earth, no matter what Obama says. Socialism does not pay for itself, it depends on there being another pocket to remove wealth from.  Once you have removed enough wealth that it is no longer self-sustaining, or promised enough to others to remove enough to prevent people from going out to make it in the first place (what's the point in killing yourself to get ahead?), you arrive at France and the PIGS. The USSR proved that it could not be done the hard way.

California is in the same boat as France and the PIGS. Nobody wants to have fat cut from their budget, they bought off the public sector unions for years -- it worked while people still flocked to California and growth kept the debt collector at bay .... But now when the red ink has become a tsunami and not merely a tide, people are unwilling to play along.  Retirees from these pubic union systems easily remove more from the system than they paid in, by any measure. So where is the balance going to come from? Am I meant to say that it is okay, take it from me because they had lower paying jobs all along, and that they served me? While I had all the risk, worked twice as long hours, no job security, far fewer holidays, no benefits ... no double dipping after 20 or 25 years, no overtime, no final three or three years with the most pay as the retirement average? Years with low income with no safety net, years with high income taxed to death? That is all a bargain I made? I don't think so. The great unwashed have always been able to vote unto themselves more that they have contributed. Now there's nothing left.