Less plumbing, more architecture.

Note : this is an automated translation.

Alexandre Grothendieck, one of the brightest minds of the 20th century, summarized the opposition between marginal improvement and more radical changes as follows: « I had the opportunity (…) to meet many people (…) who were clearly much brighter, much more ‘gifted’ than I was. I admired them for the ease with which they learned new concepts, as if playing, and juggled with them as if they had known them since their cradle – while I felt heavy and clumsy (…) However, with the hindsight of thirty or thirty-five years, I see that they have not left a truly profound imprint on the mathematics of our time (…) They remained prisoners, without knowing it, of those invisible and imperious circles that delimit a Universe in a given environment and at a given time. »

In terms of public accounts, it is simpler to play with fiscal pipes (a single article of law is enough) than to rethink structures (evolving organizations to better empower or deploy operational efficiency approaches cannot be done in a few months). Reducing the deficit is short-term plumbing (finding rates to increase, creative accounting options, or adjusting the number of subsidized jobs), but achieving lasting results is a matter of architecture – for example, questioning perimeters (do we want to use public funds to offer manga via the culture pass or thermal cures while emergency food assistance relies on associations funded by private donations) or evolving the culture (giving more latitude to operational units to solve difficulties in applying texts, valuing the achievement of results on the ground in careers, retaining or bringing back those who are capable, implementing a more balanced evaluation between the level of expenditure and the extent of improvements in the value of services rendered…).

Few subjects better embody the tension between the short term and the long term than the cost of low-skilled labor. For those who are unaware of all the chapters, a brief reminder: after years of plumbing – increases in contributions and the minimum wage leading to an increase in low-skilled unemployment – France has finally, over the last thirty years, developed an architecture to support the incomes of the less qualified without excluding them from employment: the employment premium (which increases income without weighing on labor costs) and exemptions at the minimum wage level. Far from being aids, the latter remove from wages levies that should never have been there in France and are not elsewhere, and recalling their cost is as theoretical as recalculating the cost of abolishing the salt tax with each increase in the price of salt. The ideal would be to shift all these contributions to other bases – a social VAT, for example. The least worst is to remove them only at the minimum wage level, at the cost of a theoretical brake on wage increases.

The « French preference for unemployment » was once the name given to the consensus of increasing the cost of low wages while pretending to ignore its effect on unemployment. There would be a historical responsibility, the economic and social consequences of which will be measured in a few years, in reviving this preference by reducing these exemptions. And this, while unemployment among the less educated exceeds 13% (40% for those less than 4 years in the labor market), the indexation of the minimum wage induced by the recent inflation surge has greatly increased the risk of exclusion of the low-skilled from employment, and the economic situation is hardening.

Michel Barnier inherits a situation, a time horizon, and a majority that are not conducive to radical changes. We must therefore welcome the words of Pierre Mendès-France that he recalled during his general policy speech: never « sacrifice the future to the present, » and wish him to find among public opinion the political support for architecture and preference for the long term that part of his majority seems hesitant to give him.

À propos

Dédié à l'analyse des questions économiques, sociales et environnementales de long terme, L'Observatoire du Long Terme se fixe pour objectif de donner davantage de visibilité à ces enjeux dans le débat public. Dans ce contexte, il donne la parole à des contributeurs variés, avec pour seul critère le caractère étayé des arguments présentés.

L'Observatoire est indépendant, ne reçoit aucune aide financière et repose sur le volontariat de ses contributeurs, de son bureau, présidé par Vincent Champain et Bruno Fuchs.

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