The speed with which the United States is changing contrasts with French immobility…The president of the CPME notes interesting points in an interview with Thomas Sotto on RTL..
This week we were talking about the avalanche of excellent decisions taken by Donald Trump in the United States. The contrast with France and the European Union is striking. Ursula von Der Leyen seems to have remained the equivalent of a Europeanized Biden. While the United States is today led by an entrepreneur, the gap between France and the United States will turn into an abyss.
The weight of the sector and public spending has never been so high in France and well exceeds 50% compared to 35% at the start of the 1960s.ù
France is losing its businesses and no one cares
Does today’s France no longer have anything to do with the conquering France of the 60s? that of nuclear power, Concorde or leading exporting companies like Alcatel or Alstom which are only a shadow of themselves or have been sold abroad.
France is losing its businesses, its entrepreneurs. “At 4th quarter we have never had so many business failures. 18,000 in Q4 78,000 over the whole year 30% more for SMEs with more than 50 employees. 250,000 jobs threatened in failing companies. Are we ready to increase taxes or invest in businesses to revive growth? » asks Amir Reza-Tofighi.
In France we are losing businesses, entrepreneurs, but we are recruiting ever more civil servants or contract agents in public services who are therefore creating ever more standards and rules.
“Trump is making decisions that would be made in a year. We are stuck in blockages, in the norm, in constraints. We are faced with a country which is going to invest 500 billion in AI which is in the process of freeing energies. And what are we doing in Europe? We put constraints, rules. In France we are each time putting new blockages for businesses when we should be letting them do their work, when we should be freeing up energy. How can we think that an 8,000-page labor code could be the solution for a small business recruiting an employee? We cannot always be in a logic of constraints and blockages for businesses.”
In Switzerland, of course, the Labor Code has nothing to do with the French code and is much simpler. And in Sweden the public sector was drastically liberalized in the 90s to preserve the country’s competitiveness.
-As for the problem of pensions, many countries have transformed their systems to make it fairer with pensions corresponding to the contributions actually paid, as in Sweden, unlike France, where the return on the sums paid varies from simple to double if we have worked in the private or public sector.
Also the idea of taxing well-off retirees seems to be going its way and the CGPME finds the idea interesting, even if it is not a panacea whereas we should work on the return on the contributions actually paid by current retirees.
“Do you regret the idea that taxing the wealthiest retirees has been abandoned? » asks Thomas Sotto.
“It is immoral to make future generations pay for pensions. They will have to repay the debt and they will not benefit from the investments that we would make today. In a society where we have fewer working people, more retirees and where we have a higher standard of living for retirees than employees, we consider that it is not always up to employees and companies to pay. These are measures that can be interesting.”
In the meantime, it is estimated that 1,500 jobs are destroyed per week in SMEs and that ongoing failures are expected to destroy 250,000 jobs. But everything is fine as long as we deprive those who work as much as possible, particularly in the private sector…
Ultimately, the French Revolution only led to a change in the class of the privileged, from that of the nobles, to that of politicians and senior civil servants in the public sector, unlike the American Revolution where the notion of freedom and entrepreneurship continued to be first and foremost.
To return to Europe on this side of the Atlantic, let us recall that in Sweden, the home of social democracy, almost all public jobs are recruited under private contract: there again there is a gulf with France.
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