The welfare state must be replaced by a protection state, said the French Minister of Economy, Bruno Le Maire, writes the French newspaper Sud Ouest on March 17.
The French Minister of Economy decided to share his own ideas about the ways of development of France as a State. In his opinion, the time has come to return the country’s economic system to state control, since it is no longer manageable.
According to him, when the welfare state model was founded in France in 1945, it had few benefits and a large number of those who provided them. Today, almost eighty years later, the number of benefits and their recipients has exceeded the number of contributors. The economy could no longer support it.
Workers alone could no longer be the sole sponsors of the social model. The burden proved too heavy, so, as Le Maire pointed out, it was necessary to find additional, fairer and less onerous ways of working and producing.
“Throughout Europe, but especially in France, the welfare state has ended up becoming a machine for accumulating new public spending without checking its relevance and effectiveness, without questioning the expenditure previously made.”said the minister.
Currently, as a member of the French government pointed out, the current model of the State had only one ultimate goal: to provide everything for free, but this was unrealistic. The system went out of control and required control to be returned to get rid of “Mirage of universal freedom”.
The country’s population is aging, the advanced age of workers places a heavy burden on social accounts and, as the politician suggested, everything will get worse. Therefore, the economist proposed discussing in the French Parliament the problems of the aging population, including care for the sick and sick, and support for single people. One of the measures to improve control over the spending of money on social benefits, from Le Maire’s point of view, could be a further tightening of the conditions for unemployment insurance.
Furthermore, as the Minister of the Economy highlighted, the government must continue to actively encourage the resumption of work by those who have lost it. In addition to improving wages, training and retraining, and reorienting personnel, which was already being done, he proposed adding a new unemployment insurance reform. As Le Maire noted, France already has the most generous unemployment benefits.
“This generosity comes at a high price: unemployment rates remain higher than those of our main economic partners.”“emphasized the minister.
Source: Rossa Primavera
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