Its Hard To Imagine Matters Are Getting Worse, Not Just Regarding The Individual Economies, But Also The Response To It.... While We Are Surrounded By Idiocy Everywhere! The glory days of France’s welfare model may be behind it. The country’s Socialist government led by Prime Minister Manuel Valls is chipping away at a system that dispenses 52 billion euros ($66 billion) annually just in family benefits, and is among the most generous in the world... Valls has mapped out his plans: streamlining unemployment benefits, cutting bonuses for newborns and pegging family allowances to household income -- all of which amount to a de facto re-writing of France’s welfare rules. The social security budget for 2015, cleared by the French cabinet yesterday, slashes family benefits by 700 million euros... Several pillars of the French welfare model will be pulled down by the changes. (1) (1a) France must not shy away from further reforms of its costly unemployment benefit system, its economy minister said in a newspaper interview, fanning a debate that has divided the ruling Socialists and angered powerful trade unions. France is under pressure to implement deep structural reforms after acknowledging it would only bring its budget deficit into line with EU rules by 2017, two years later than promised, due to anaemic growth. “There should be no taboo…The social benefits system has a 4 billion euro (3.14 billion pound) deficit, what politician could be satisfied with this,” Macron told Sunday’s Journal du Dimanche. “There was a reform, but it is not enough”, he told the weekly... “It’s up to unions to get things done,” said Macron, a former banker and one-time economic adviser to President Francois Hollande. (2) Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi won a confidence vote... on a proposed overhaul of the country’s labor laws, showing he’s willing to push changes through regardless of opposition... He has also shown willingness to face Italy’s biggest labor union, the CGIL, which has already called a demonstration in Rome on Oct. 25 to protest against the plan... “We’ve waited 40 years for these reforms,” Renzi said... at a press conference in Milan following a meeting of European Union leaders, vowing to bring home results no matter what... Renzi’s so-called “Jobs Act,” which was put to the vote, includes plans to cut the number of short-term contracts, simplify the labor code and create a system in which workers’ protection increases with seniority... “I think the direction is right but we hope the prime minister will be very determined and will get both rapid approval of the reforms and, above all, their rapid implementation,” Marcella Panucci, director general of Italy’s biggest employers’ lobby, Confindustria, said... (3) ... hours after winning the economics Nobel Prize, speaking on France 24, French economist Jean Tirole advocated Scandinavian-style labour market policies and government reform as a way of preserving France’s social model. Wait, he said he believes in... less government? Sacre bleu, A French economist advocating less socialism? ... From France 24: “We haven’t succeeded in France to undertake the labour market reforms that are similar to those in Germany, Scandinavia and so on,” he said in telephone interview from the French city of Toulouse, where he teaches. France is plagued by record unemployment and Tirole described the French job market as “catastrophic”... arguing that the excessive protection for employees had frozen the country’s job market. (4) Paul Krugman: As in previous episodes, the worst news is coming from Europe, but this time there is also a clear slowdown in emerging markets - and there are even warning signs in the United States, despite pretty good job growth at the moment. Why does this keep happening? After all, the events that brought on the Great Recession - the housing bust, the banking crisis - took place a long time ago. Why cant we escape their legacy? The proximate answer lies in a series of policy mistakes (!): Austerity when economies needed stimulus, paranoia about inflation when the real risk is deflation, and so on. But why do governments keep making these mistakes? In particular, why do they keep making the same mistakes, year after year? The answer, Id suggest, is an excess of virtue. Righteousness is killing the world economy. (5) RIGHTEOUSNESS??????
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 17:44:56 +0000
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