State loan to CAC 40 companies, Pandora Papers and the impoverishment of the single mother: the deviances of an amoral contemporary welfare
by Deborah Liebart, and Marco Manca. This article can be cited by the DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6647214
Licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0
It's bad to be women in a State that substitutes welfare with resilience... According to the latest france Stratégie report, of October 2021, the tax reform implemented in recent years has not had the expected results[1]. There is no measurable effect of the trickle-down theory... in fact, there is an enrichment of the richest and a pauperization of the poorest. The invalidity of this theory was already noted in the past: the IMF acknowledged in 2015 that this theory was not based on any objective scientific fact[2]. It has been observed on several occasions that the more tax allowances are introduced for the wealthiest, the richer they become without anything benefiting the most modest, even as the negative impact of inequality is now widely known[3]. The reason is simple: give money to the most modest, they will consume and reinject the money received into the real economy. Exonerate the richest from taxation and they take out of the monetary circuit values, preventing its circulation from one actor to another. Nevertheless, according to Keynes, criticizing Say's theory, wage is not only a cost, but also a determinant of demand because the amounts paid are then reinjected into the economy through the mechanism of consumption. This was already an intuition of Ford, used very pragmatically to shape the personal mobility market demand.
Schematically, today in all Western countries, one can distinguish two sociological groups in this post-health crisis world: the wealthiest, the « premiers de cordée [4]» whose incomes have prospered even at the height of the crisis and the others, the « gens qui ne sont rien [5]».
…No hidden savings in a tax haven, no opaque financial package allowing you to benefit from tax optimization reserved for an economic and political elite campaigning on the theme of the fight against corruption? We won't find your name in the Pandora Papers[6]…
…No hidden savings in a tax haven, no opaque financial package allowing you to benefit from tax optimization reserved for an economic and political elite campaigning on the theme of the fight against corruption? We won't find your name in the Pandora Papers[6]…
To this injustice opposing rich and poor, is superimposed another injustice, that of gender. In this post-covid world, women and especially single mothers are on the front line of mass impoverishment[7]. Less paid than men, with equal work[8], women are suffering the consequences of the economic crisis. Faced with the impoverishment of the population, the French government proposes the payment of an exceptional bonus of 100 euros, to offset the increase in fuel prices[9]. This exceptional bonus will be partly financed by the surplus VAT on foodstuffs collected by the State.
It is a self-financing of the poor by the poor, for the poor, presented by the government as a measure of social justice... An implacable logic that consists in taking from the most modest through VAT to redistribute to them a bonus collected on... their own expenses... An additional humiliation for the most precarious who see their work subsidized by the state instead of living with dignity from their salary, which has become almost impossible as the labour situation is now degraded. The breaking point seems to have been reached and implicitly, the current situation once again raises questions about the universal income, but also the role to be played by the work unions, because many parts misunderstand welfare (even among European middle class) and would like to see public utility jobs be run by those on welfare, totally oblivious to the fact that if we were paying enough (and staffing enough) we would not have people in welfare, and the jobs would be run with dignity and quality control…
State-guaranteed loans were calculated based on payroll. Billions in taxes[10] were distributed month after month to support small businesses but also large industrial groups listed on the stock exchange, while employees did not see the end of the tunnel of this health-economic crisis[11]. Preserving the economic ecosystem to restart as soon as possible after the crisis was the stated goal of policymakers[12]. But at what cost and whom for?
A drastic increase in public debt, which in the end will only be financed by economic austerity measures weakening the most fragile a little more and destabilizing the social balance of our democracies by creating domestic spasmodic revolts.
The increase in poverty of the population and in particular of single-parent families, most often dependent on mothers, in a system that supports businesses[13], even the largest[14], highlights the deviant nature of contemporary welfare where it looks like we have substituted individuals with companies as the units of citizenship. Sometimes working is no longer enough to live with dignity in Western countries[15]. The yellow vests were the "whistleblowers" of this situation, in the first rank of which we saw single mothers denouncing their living conditions, even before the health crisis. To understand what we are talking about, it is enough to make a small flashback on the life of single mothers during the year 2020.
Being a single mother during lockdown was not only about cutting back on her sleep time to work when the children were asleep and then starting her day as a homeschool teacher, it was not about managing to live with the loss of wages, short-time working, the dysfunctions of unreachable administrations for months, it was also a voluntary annihilation of one's own needs in order to privilege those of the children and not to make them feel the weight of daily difficulties in a period when isolation already weighed on the morale of the children, locked at home outside any school context, far from friends, playgrounds, otherness and sociability.
Being a single mother was also, for some of them, the slow fall into professional and social precariousness, out of sight and in silence. The system sometimes confuses precariousness suffered and laziness, stigmatizing the figure of the poor rather than thinking the global issue of a necrotic society of work where women are paid less for equal work, a society where the global issue increased financialization and its impact is ignored. It is also important to understand that this impoverishment has not only affected the lowest wages and the least qualified women. As ever “This […] affects disproportionately female scientists and those with young children…[16]”.
Far from ministerial offices where parity is gradually imposed, the daily reality of people is very different. What about a sick child? When the school calls and requests the immediate evacuation of the child, a situation that has become common with Covid, since any temperature above 38 degrees should lead to the isolation and evacuation of the student? Leaving your job in a hurry at the risk of being stigmatized by the company? What to do when the child does not heal fast enough according to the rules imposed by the company? When the child is too sick but his condition does not allow to benefit from social devices?
Yet very often I still hear very harsh words against single mothers living this type of situation. How do you know what tomorrow will be made of? A sick child, a divorce, a disappearance... and it is the whole daily life that can change. Life is sometimes just a matter of forced adaptation to uncontrollable parameters.
Without concession, single mothers are still too often subject to the judgment of a society that complains about the lack of involvement of parents in the education of their children, their lack of investment alongside this generation that nevertheless represents the future of our society, and at the same time quickly judges them failing when they meet the imperatives imposed by their status as mothers, in other word the opposition between the educational liberal model and the « nation forming » model. A terrible hypocrisy of a system collapsing from its own mistakes, especially on the role of women in matters of care.
While for centuries women have been entrusted with the care of their families, their children, and by extension society as a whole, surreptitiously, the discourse has changed. In this times, marriage was a part of the social contract and almost a form of welfare, after the industrialisation... As culture and aspiration changed, and certain situations resulting from that ill posed form of “welfare” emerged, highjacked and have left huge idiosyncrasies, in particular, around childhood protection…
Faced with the capping of men's wages, allowing companies to make ever larger margins to maintain their international competitiveness, the dominant, liberal discourse then began to despise the mother of the family, the "housewife under 50 years old" of the polls. To be socially recognized, the figure of the woman had to become a professionally recognized, liberated woman, while assuming all domestic tasks and the education of children. Emancipating themselves financially, women refused the patriarchy imposed on them, while believing that the system would help them when the marital situation required them to leave the home. All this ensues from multifactorial realities both in terms of the economic model and the transformation of bourgeois feminist movements around the 1970s, in particular the transformations linked to the growing spread of Germanopratin culture and spirit.
The reality is quite different, first fiscally. For example, if paying alimony means tax exemption for fathers, receiving a pension means, sometimes for the mother, the impossibility of obtaining certain social assistance, regardless of the amount of the pension received[17]. One more "social punishment" for divorced mothers who must make up for the rest to charge of supporting a child with dignity.
For information, the average French alimony amounts to 170 euros per month[18]. For all useful purposes, I remind you here that between 6 and 12 years old, the average monthly cost of a child is around 450 euros, excluding daycare fees, school fees and exceptional costs[19]… The disparity in the average economic involvement of each parent in the child's education is evident here. Yet it is still the mothers who are singled out, and it is not the system put in place by the Family Allowance Funds for unpaid alimony payments[20] that will fundamentally change the situation.
More and more, whether they are colleagues or friends, I hear the same speech: "when the children are not there, I do not eat, so when they are with me we can do activities that they like". I heard those confession from women who work in the civil service, full-time but who, alone, or receiving a small alimony cannot live with dignity.
Women carrying social ills are more prone to developing diseases related to precariousness and economic anxieties. We note the same type of phenomena in all the countries of Europe[21], but also more broadly Western with even more terrible situations in the United States[22] when social protection is practically non-existent... Where, the system is totally amoral, it is that while the precarious are struggling, the race for Mars and space tourism is played without modesty on our screens, scandals like the Pandora Papers explode, some large groups receiving state aid to hire use these sums without control to practice share buybacks[23] thus artificially raising their prices, the managers of these companies being paid in part in stock option, their income increases and escapes any control of the tax authorities thanks to clever manoeuvres of legal tax optimization. While press, that is now living mostly off sponsorship, condemns the mother of a family, stealing meat to feed her children[24], it accepts this optimization and even this large-scale tax evasion... The complicity between political deviance and the media is worth mentioning : different rhetorical frames for rich and poor, white and black, men and women, companies and individuals...
Billions in tax gifts for the richest and without distinction for listed companies and SMEs and alms in the form of an exceptional bonus for the precarious. It is a totally biaised vision of the balance of forces contributing to the labor economy, in which only the capital counts at a time when financialization is developing and already allows in some cases to make disappear the worker, less reliable than a robot, who can get sick and unionize in order to defend his rights. Automatization is exploited, by financialized companies, to fragment jobs in less identifiable tasks, where humans are given the feeling of helping the robot instead of viceversa.
The labour force, in the broad sense, is no longer recognized at its true value. Added to this is an increasingly visible class contempt, no longer hiding its cynicism in the face of the impoverishment of the people. We will remember and appreciate the statements of the Minister of the Economy Macron, in 2014, on illiterate women[25], in Breton slaughterhouses, the "toothless" of President Hollande, mocking the poorest whose cannot pay their dental expenses.
Yet there was a moment at the turn of the last century when welfare thinkers and actors were more ambitious and quicker to defend and protect the most fragile and not to blame them for all their ills without any possible escape[26].
These thinkers, whether doctors, scientists, industrialists, politicians, or social actors, thought of the world as a whole in an interdisciplinary way without opposing each other, but by adopting a nuanced vision of poverty and not a distorted image of the poor. This is the case of the experiments carried out by the mutual and social communities in England[27], French and American utopian communities[28], but also the family of Guise[29]... Many pioneers of the Paris Commune participated in this effort, taking charge of social ills, helping the most vulnerable and especially women. What have we done with this world? Of these noble ideals ? How did we arrive at this dehumanized and dehumanizing model? A system that like a loop breaks bodies and souls again ? And at the end of the day, what place do we give our children in this world ? What place do we leave to the time of education, care and care?
Always strengthen international competitiveness, improve cycle time, exhaust bodies[30], this is the norm in Western societies today, with the aim, to make the poorest work, a consumer society without limit sponsored by the State providing companies with subsidies, guaranteed loans, various tax exemptions. As in the subprime crisis, the winners of the health crisis are the same as before the crisis, the wealthiest[31]. In other words, national solidarity has played a full role for the richest and left out the most fragile, just as it did during the 2008 crisis. It seems that the first victim of the crises of recent decades is in reality the public service and, with it, its users, taxpayers, citizens, the people in their diversity and their entirety, and in the first place, the mother in precarious situations, who may one day find the means to assert her right to live with dignity, (why not ?), through collective legal action recognizing their "state of necessity[32]",that is, a situation in which a person finds himself who, in order to safeguard a higher interest, has no other resource than to perform an act prohibited by criminal law.
https://www.imf.org/~/media/Websites/IMF/Imported/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/_sdn1513pdf.ashx
https://www.imf.org/~/media/Websites/IMF/Imported/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2011/_sdn1108pdf.ashx
Le Covid-19 a coûté entre 170 et 200 milliards d'euros à la France (latribune.fr)
Covid-19 : Quelles aides pour les entreprises pendant l'été ? | economie.gouv.fr
https://eurodiaconia.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/topical-report_minimum_income_2014.pdf
https://t.co/3rTh63DvQk(https://twitter.com/ruth_baker/status/1458869165566140426t=HxnRq_taJcET5nN2482UuQ&s=03)
- Code pénal français, art.122-7.
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