The authors of "A five-year term at 500 billion" scour the management of the president.
Ask your questions to the authors ofA five-year term of 500 billion, Mélanie Delattre and Emmanuel Lévy by posting your question in the Comments section at the bottom of source this article
The scene is surreal. "See, I won! I won!" launches, triumphant and vengeful, Nicolas Sarkozy to the deputy of the New Center Charles de Courson, present at the Elysée for a ceremony at the beginning of 2010. What victory so important does the President of the Republic take advantage of? To have lowered unemployment or restored the balance of foreign trade? None of that, of course. Nicolas Sarkozy welcomes the 390 million euros that will go to the Tapie couple (including 45 for non-pecuniary damage) following a ruling by the Council of State which rejects the appeal brought by some deputies, including Courson, against the conclusions of an arbitral tribunal in the Adidas-Crédit lyonnais case. "I won! I won!" Stunning because, if victory there is, it is that of Tapie, the president's friend. And not at all that of the State, forced to write a big check.
Authors ofA five-year term of 500 billion, Mélanie Delattre, journalist at Point, and Emmanuel Lévy, at Marianne, list with greed and severity the small and large liberalities of the President of the Republic with his "friends" Liliane Bettencourt or Guy Wildenstein, or, less known, with Hubert Martigny, from whom the State bought the room at a high price Pleyel. When they are not looking for the little beast, the two authors also put themselves in overhang to deliver to readers-voters the "true assessment" of the economic five-year Sarkozy. And there they are not in the lace. Their audit being quite terrifying, one could consider it militant. But the facts are the facts. Since Nicolas Sarkozy came to power, France's debt has increased by 630 billion euros, from 1 billion to 150 billion euros. Enormous. The Élysée, relayed by Bercy, puts these results - "calamitous", could say Alain Juppé - on the account of the most serious economic crisis since 1. Too easy, retort Delattre and Lévy. Based on official documents, they show that the 780 crisis, by lowering revenues and burdening expenses, would have increased the debt by 1929 billion euros. But the rest, entirely attributable to the president, amounts to 2008 billion euros (the title of their book rounds it up to 109). Explanations: "The budget which Nicolas Sarkozy inherited, like a badly tuned car (...), grilled 520 points of GDP." Rather than "lift the hood to adjust the machine", the Elysée let it go. By not curbing this drift, it has inflated the debt by 500 billion euros. To which are added 3,2 billion, because "the new president has also pressed the mushroom". Nicolas Sarkozy, the man who wanted to put the state on a diet, caused France's public debt to jump by 370 points (of which only 153 are attributable to the crisis)!
Penelope syndrome
Where is the "true economic revolution" promised to the country? The president has certainly opened an impressive number of sites that none of his predecessors had dared to touch. He attacked the job market, union representativeness, the consolidation of Pôle emploi and Assedic, the court map, vocational training and even special pension plans (just scratched, however) ... The hyperpresident has been hyperactive. But then, why is the success not there? By exposing the reasons for the country's economic and financial drift during the five-year term, the two authors could not help but evoke the personality of a president whom they describe as a "chameleon". For them, Nicolas Sarkozy "never had any real ideological basis in economic matters". A liberal, he once advocated French-style subprime; interventionist, he flies to the aid of companies in difficulty, believing, each time, to renew the blow of Alstom; friend of CEOs (ah! Fouquet's), he also flirts with the CGT.
Schizophrenic Sarkozy, as the authors claim? Four years later, in any case, his "message is scrambled". When he arrived at the Élysée in 2007, Sarkozy was attracted to Great Britain (especially that of Margaret Thatcher) and ignored Germany. At the end of the mandate, it is quite the opposite. Elected by promising to lower compulsory levies by 4 points, he showed formidable creativity in inventing taxes: tax on fish, motor oils, private copying of hard drives, telephony and Internet, sodas , insurance... The founding economic act of the five-year term, this has not escaped the notice of the authors, is, of course, the Tepa law of summer 2007. The spirit is clear: we must leave the rich get richer, because the whole society will benefit. This is how the massive exemptions from inheritance tax and the famous tax shield arrive, a disguised way of reforming the ISF. This is how also happens, under the "work more to earn more", the exemption from taxes and charges on overtime, way of contesting the 35 hours. To these costly measures will be added the sustainability, increase or creation of tax loopholes (exemption from capital gains on the sale of company securities, tax-research credit, reduced VAT for restaurateurs, etc.). Most disconcerting is that, in a rare volte-face, the president will unravel part of the Tepa law. "Even in the land of fiscal instability, we had never seen a majority defeat at the end of their mandate what they had voted on their arrival."
The Bercy paradox
Equally troubling, at no time is the question of lower spending raised. They will therefore continue to climb (from 52,4% of GDP to 57%, an exceptional level for a major industrialized country). Sarkozy reinforced his image of "spendthrift" acquired during his passage to the Budget in 1993. His attempts to tame the state mammoth have neither had great results nor opened up great prospects. It is true that the president himself does not lead by example. If - and the authors underline it - the budget of the Élysée has never been so transparent, that does not prevent slippages: multiple trips with cohorts of accompanying persons, increase in staff, invoices for works, service of American order...
More seriously, the emblematic measure consisting in not replacing one out of two retiring civil servants did not produce accounting miracles (264 million euros net of savings in 2009). It is true that "more than 80% of the savings went not into the pocket of the taxpayer..., but into that of the civil servants". The "1 on 2" would sin by its blind side: "The approach is purely quantitative." A criticism that we find for the General Review of Public Policies, which does not question, as Canada and Sweden did, the usefulness of certain services. The diversion of these good intentions is also illustrated by the merger of the two flagship services of Bercy, the General Directorate of Taxes (it collects) and the General Directorate of Public Accounting (it calculates).
Political budget
There are countless ministers who broke their teeth on the project. Many had dreamed of it, Sarkozy did it. Hats off to the artist! However, our friends from Point and Marianne (they have a hard tooth) only recognize it as a relative merit. The end of the bastilles of Bercy, they write, "could have been set up as a symbol of the rupture promised before the campaign". Instead, the government is very "low key on the subject". The reason ? The expected savings are not there. Because "the choice was made to align the salaries of the staff upwards", which, for some, generated gains of 30 to 40% "without moving from their seat". If the workforce has fallen, the mass of remuneration has increased.
"The president has always been more pragmatic than dogmatic", summarizes a senior Chiraquian official quoted by Delattre and Lévy. They thus explain the two good surprises of the mandate, the reform of universities and the reform of pensions, the latter having never been promised by the candidate Sarkozy. On the contrary: "The right to retire at age 60 must remain", he declared. The authors of A five-year term of 500 billion explain the president's activism on pensions by the need for the Elysée to accomplish at the end of his term "a significant political act" which makes the left appear old-fashioned. The strategy is working quite well. To the point, moreover, that the president seeks to redo the coup with the “golden rule” on balanced budgets, which was not on the program either. The man who weighs 500 billion is not afraid of anything. Because the Cades episode says a lot about the very recent conversion of the President of the Republic to budgetary virtue. In October 2010, Cades, a fund where we have become accustomed to accommodating Social Security deficits, was authorized to borrow an additional 130 billion euros. Created by Alain Juppé in 1996, it was to disappear in 2009 (at the same time as its recipe, the CRDS, paid by all French people). Lionel Jospin had postponed the deadline to 2014, Jacques Chirac to 2018. Sarkozy bursts the ceiling by moving to 2025. In the international crisis, the "candidate for rupture" has certainly shown decisiveness and initiative, highlighted in the book. On the other hand, with regard to budgetary policy, "he has only followed in the footsteps of his predecessors". This is not worth condemnation, conclude Delattre and Lévy. Even if the mandate is an economic "fiasco", "a few months before the presidential election everything suggests that the outgoing president will be judged more on his stature as a statesman than on his record".
Ask your questions to the authors ofA five-year term of 500 billion, Mélanie Delattre and Emmanuel Lévy by posting your question in the Comments section at the bottom of this article
By Patrick Bonazza
source: lepoint.fr
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