Is money missing or unevenly distributed? The authors of this essay break the deadlock and reveal the heist of the century!
From 10 billion euros in 2024, 20 in 2025 … At a time when we are only talking about savings so as not to aggravate budget deficits, the “crazy money” (Macron) that social assistance and health insurance, civil servant positions and services cost The public are singled out as the main responsible and guilty of all our misfortunes.
Curiously, the considerable amount of financial aid allocated to businesses is never mentioned. This aid amounted to 65 billion in 2007. The 2008 crisis boosted it to 110 billion. The tax credit for competition and employment (CICE) established by President Hollande and made permanent by Emmanuel Macron raises the bill to 150 billion.
And the infernal spiral is far from having stopped. More than two thousand forms of aid are added to each other, for an amount which today would be close to 170 billion. The tap of public money open to the world of lucrative business has turned into Niagara Falls.
Ever more restrictions on public services that meet the essential needs of the entire population (health, education, security, etc.) and ever more public money to support businesses. Between 2007 and 2018, social assistance increased three times slower than that granted to businesses. It is no longer so much a question of direct vertical subsidies as of indirect horizontal aid. All these reductions, exemptions from social charges, reduced rates, various deductions, tax credits, etc. today represent 5.6% of GDP compared to 3.5% in 2007.
How can we explain these economic and especially political choices? Several conceptions justify them. Firstly, there is the valorization of the private entrepreneur presented as the only creator of wealth and the parallel reduction of public services to the rank of burdens which weigh on the competitiveness of our companies, slowing down their innovation, their profitability and their exports on the global market.
When, in 2019, 45 billion were allocated to job seekers, 75 billion were allocated to relieve businesses of the cost of labor. But no, definitely, it is the unemployed who weigh the most in the sharing of wealth! Meeting the demands of the private sector has become the only possible way to promote prosperity and growth, a choice favored by governments of the right, left and center. And preferably, by giving in to the massive lobbying of the biggest companies, who benefit from 70% of the aid and 90% of its amounts.
To swallow the pill, it is, then, the myth of job creation which is agitated. The 19 billion from the CICE will have made it possible to create or save… 100,000! Which represents 190,000 euros per job. It is difficult to imagine that all this money was used solely to combat unemployment, while at the same time layoff plans were implemented in ten of the fourteen largest groups which benefited from them. Also, it is possible to transform the formula of Bruno Lemaire, our former Minister of the Economy: “ yesterday’s dividends are the investments today‘hui and the jobs of tomorrow » by reversing it: “ job cuts from yesterday are today’s profits and dividends of tomorrow ».
This policy is marked by the blind trust placed in economic partners who are allocated a lot of aid without any compensation or verification of their use.. We are far from the hunt for social aid fraudsters that need to be uncovered in any beneficiary, suspected of settling into welfare, even though a real addiction to aid has taken over the world of welfare. ‘business.
Finally, comes the trickle-down legend claiming that the enrichment at the top would flow, by simple effect of gravity, towards the lower strata of society.. Certainly, the profits of CAC-40 companies increased by 35% in 2021, allowing them both to buy back their shares (which increases their value) and to increase dividends by 40% between 2021 and 2023 (they absorbed 35% of profits during the Thirty Glorious Years compared to 80% today).
Indeed, the wealth of French billionaires increased by 236 billion during the first eighteen months of the pandemic. Without doubt, the income of the bosses of the CAC-40 groups increased by 29% between 2019 and 2022. But, at the bottom of the scale, we did not see much happening during the same period.
We inherited from the post-war period a Welfare State, this welfare state which protects the most vulnerable, by redistributing resources. Gradually, it is giving way to the Corporate State (the State which serves the profits of private companies) conclude the authors.
This article is part of the “Open Book” section
It is signed Jacques Trémintin
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- The violence of the rich. Chronicle of an immense social breakdownMichel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlet, Ed. Zones, 2013, 252 p., We could do nothing against globalization, our country should put an end to social charges which weigh on the competitiveness of businesses, social benefits would constitute a brake economic development, etc. ? The authors strongly doubt it!
- The time of the rich. Anatomy of a SecessionThierry Pech, Seuil, 2011, 178 p., Wealth constitutes both a powerful ideal of personal accomplishment, making those who lack it dream, and a scandalous negation of equality.
