“We must replace the welfare state with the protective state”explains the minister, who gives this three-page interview that looks like a political program, on the occasion of the publication of a new book, “La Voie Française”, published by Flammarion, “written during the Christmas holidays”.
When the welfare state model was founded in 1945, it had “few benefits and many contributors. Nearly eighty years later, there are many benefits and fewer contributors. How can this hold up? Employees can no longer be the sole financiers of the social model. The burden is too heavy. We must find complementary paths, fairer and less penalizing for work and production.”develops Bruno Le Maire.
According to him, “all over Europe”more “especially in France”, “the welfare state has ended up becoming a machine for piling on new public spending, without examining their relevance or their effectiveness, without calling into question previous spending either. We must regain control of this system which has become uncontrollable. “
According to him, the current model has “ultimate goal: free everything, for everyone, all the time: it’s untenable!”.
The minister believes that “the time for choices has come”, to escape from the “mirage of universal free access”.
He argues by citing in particular the aging of the population, with the great age which “weighs heavily on social accounts and will weigh more and more”, and calls for debate in parliament on “the major issues of aging, the care of dependency, the support of single people”.
In his vision of the France of tomorrow, Bruno Le Maire does not exclude further tightening of the conditions of unemployment insurance.
“We must continue to massively encourage the return to work in France. Better remuneration, training, promotion of hiring sectors, better orientation are policies that we are already implementing. Let us add a new reform of the “unemployment insurance: we still have one of the most generous compensation periods in Europe. This generosity comes at a high price: an unemployment rate still above that of our main economic partners”says the minister.
If we want to make hospital emergencies a priority, we must know how to give up “to other less priority expenses”he said.
