He is due to his status as president of purchasing power. Already before the start of his second term, Emmanuel Macron multiplied the measures designed to preserve the standard of living of French men and women in the face of ever-higher inflation. Due to the war in Ukraine, but also to the health crisis and the responses to it, as well as specific climatic conditions, shortages and supply difficulties have followed one another. The prices of consumer goods have increased, sometimes exponentially, as Planet has already had the opportunity to point out. Aware of this fact, the executive recently presented two pieces of legislation relating to purchasing power. They were debated “hardly”, let TF1 know on its information site. But why oppose measures aimed simply at boosting the incomes of populations hurt by inflation? Explanations.
The texts carried by the presidential majority include a range of specific measures, designed to support the purchasing power of French men and women. These include the following nudges:
For part of the left, which opposes some of the measures mentioned, the problem comes in particular from the fact that the executive refuses to consider wage increases. Explanations.
It is difficult not to act in the face of soaring prices. According to Alternatives Économiques, however, the response formulated by the executive leaves much to be desired: firstly because it is poorly motivated (we are talking here about electoral opportunism, among other things) and secondly because, despite the efforts made, they are fairly poorly distributed and therefore inevitably costly. In addition, insist our colleagues, all the solutions envisaged are focused on the short term and therefore do not allow us to hope for an increase in the income of French men and women in the future.
“For workers, the rise in wages has an obvious interest: it is permanent. An employer cannot go back on it after having decided on it. A bonus, on the other hand, there is nothing to say that it will be renewed. It is based on the results of the company, among other elements. The game is therefore not the same”, explains the economist Jacques Bichot from the outset. The root of the problem, which feeds the criticism, is therefore based on the inability of the allowances and bonuses desired by the government to sustainably improve the daily lives of workers.
“Let’s not forget either that most bonuses, as is the case with the Macron bonus, do not carry social rights. Very concretely, this means that it does not allow you to acquire new pension rights, unlike an increase”, continues the former member of the Economic Council.
That being said, underlines the expert, we must also ask the question of the feasibility of the measures. “Bonus and compensation have the advantage of being honest, realistic,” he says.
The other aspect to mention is the price control planned by the deputies of the presidential majority. Concretely, they plan to go through the maintenance (if not the improvement) of the rebate on the price of the liter of fuel or the price shield initially brandished by Jean Castex. A very bad idea, according to Jacques Bichot.
“This is not a viable policy. It is the option of tinsel, of the visible. We had to do something that strikes the mind, that everyone notices and that everyone understands”, first observes the economist, for whom the problem is the difficulty of turning off the tap after having turned it on. “We are going to face, when the time comes, a tremendous stream of recriminations,” he said.
And he reminds us that any price control policy ultimately leads to an impossibility to inflate wages. “When a company cannot choose its prices, it cannot grow either and therefore increase wages,” he points out.