> a youth unemployment rate of 25 percent for nearly 30
What does it ACTUALLY mean to be unemployed in France?
In the US, if I lose my job and cannot find another for a long time, here is what happens:
• I have to start paying for health insurance. This will probably be in the $500-1000/month range.
• Unemployment insurance pays me for a while.
• In a little over a year, unemployment runs out. At that point, I'll be living entirely on my savings.
• When savings run out, I lose my house. Oh, I also lose my health insurance.
• Before becoming homeless and losing most of my possessions. Hopefully, in the prior year I've been eating good healthy home-cooked food to save money, and also hitting my treadmill regularly, and so might have gotten into good enough shape to no longer need my diabetes and blood pressure medicine, since I can no longer afford them.
To sum it up, being unemployed in the US means you are majorly screwed. Our social safety nets are just not very good.
Our health insurance safety net, for instance, is the emergency room. If you show up with a life threatening condition, they are required to treat you regardless of insurance or ability to pay. They only treat you enough so that you are no longer in immediate danger, and then they can kick you out. Given the choice between providing someone with $30 worth of drugs a month that will keep their condition under control forever, or letting their condition become life threatening and treating it with a $5000 emergency room visit every 2 or 3 months to just keep them alive--the US goes with the latter. Giving them a $30/month prescription would be socialism, and we can't have that.
Although you address a legitimate question--how the safety net affects the unemployment market, your description of U.S. Healthcare is largely inaccurate and worth clearing up.
Since the 1980's every state in the U.S. has offered a Medicaid-funded program. These programs would almost certainly cover you in this hypothetical situation, including covering diabetes or hypertension medicine. Yes, a few politicians dislike the program and many vote against its expansion, but belying your use of the "socialism" epithet, the program is widely accepted in the U.S. and ending it is a fringe opinion.
The scenario you describe (ER's provide acute/crisis care to people who have no routine monitoring) does legitimately describe people who (a) fail to properly enroll in Medicaid, or (b) have too high an income for Medicaid but still consider insurance unaffordable. Productive work is being done to address both of these gaps, but your characterization gives the wrong impression about the current state of the safety net.
I think I have to disagree. Not knowing the specifics of French unemployment benefits, here in Germany, the situation is probably closer to that in France than that in the US. If you are unemployed, you still have health insurance, you get some money, and becoming homeless because of unemployment is basically unheard of.
So far, I have yet to meet a person that is happily unemployed here. There is a huge social stigma attached to it and people get depressed because the self-image suffers from being unemployed for longer times. Going a little bit over the top, the whole incentive argument to me sounds like this: Since being miserable does not provide the right incentives for an unemployed person to search for work, the situation must be improved by making them miserable and hungry/homeless.
France is like most countries with high unemployment in that the primary cause of unemployment is that there aren't enough jobs. Germany has the mittelstand which keeps over 70% of the population employed. The US has its own version of the mittelstand with over 26,000 Subway sandwich franchises, so its unemployement rate is only slightly worse than Germany.
Rubbish. There is a massive lack of jobs, just like everywhere else in Europe.
There may be a lack of high-paying, low-stress jobs, the kind that spoiled, study-a-random-field-till-30 university graduates generally feel entitled to, but that's not the same thing.
>There may be a lack of high-paying, low-stress jobs, the kind that spoiled, study-a-random-field-till-30 university graduates generally feel entitled to, but that's not the same thing.
What are you referencing by that? Off the top of my mind I can't think of any low-stress job. Sure, some jobs are less stressful, but I don't think anyone has the expectation to find a job that doesn't conform to general properties of almost all jobs.
It's a combination of incentives. Being unemployed is less awful in France, so there is negative pressure on being employed. Additionally, the cost to fund such a program creates negative pressure on increased employment through various means.
By no means am I a hardcore conservative and against these programs (they have their place), but innovation and employment thrives in a less regulated environment. We can argue about the quality of the labor in such systems, but that's entirely different.
An interesting hypothesis. Evidence against it is that Germany has a similar net and yet unemployment amongst the youth is less than half that of America.
Keep in mind that unemployment in France, Belgium and Holland (I'm not very well informed on Germany, only saying here what I've seen directly), unemployment is determined by social status.
In the lower social classes (the equivalent of trailor park in the US I guess), unemployment is somewhere between accepted and encouraged (because it means these people can help eachother out). Amongst the educated, unemployment is a stigma, with possible exceptions for people who are content to beg a life together as "artists" or hermits (these guys are what holds up the science department in universities though). Getting a job and raising a family is what everybody else in the middle and higher classes do.
The problems are threefold.
First, the lower classes don't shrink. Well they shrink by birthrate, but not fast enough.
Second, people are getting forced into the lower classes (the biggest effects are car manufacturer closings, which destroy tens of thousands of jobs in one go). Far more go into them than ever come out. You can bet though, that the government will find a way to not count these people in the joblessness figures. In Belgium, over 10000 ex-Opel employees got to go on pension, some as young as 38. Real unemployment in France and Belgium is just shy of double the official figures, coming up to almost 25%.
Third is immigration. This is not a problem anywhere except the huge cities, but there the problem is endemic. The vast majority of immigrants in Western Europe join the low end of the lower class, where it's almost a crime to hold a job (it'll get you mugged regularly, for one thing).
I don't know what is happening in Germany, but this is what's happening in most of Western Europe, and it won't end well, that's for sure.
Unemployed people I know do not like being unemployed. There are people who don't want to work, and are fine mooching, but it is such a small percentage that it's a cost I'm willing to pay to protect people. Complaining about those "mooching off" of the safety net is like complaining about voter fraud in the US.
Giving them a $30/month prescription would be socialism, and we can't have that.
What about Medicare and Medicaid, not to mention Medicare Schedule D? The US has lots of socialized medicine going around. (Whether that's a good or bad thing is not what I'm commenting on...)
What does it ACTUALLY mean to be unemployed in France?
In the US, if I lose my job and cannot find another for a long time, here is what happens:
• I have to start paying for health insurance. This will probably be in the $500-1000/month range.
• Unemployment insurance pays me for a while.
• In a little over a year, unemployment runs out. At that point, I'll be living entirely on my savings.
• When savings run out, I lose my house. Oh, I also lose my health insurance.
• Before becoming homeless and losing most of my possessions. Hopefully, in the prior year I've been eating good healthy home-cooked food to save money, and also hitting my treadmill regularly, and so might have gotten into good enough shape to no longer need my diabetes and blood pressure medicine, since I can no longer afford them.
To sum it up, being unemployed in the US means you are majorly screwed. Our social safety nets are just not very good.
Our health insurance safety net, for instance, is the emergency room. If you show up with a life threatening condition, they are required to treat you regardless of insurance or ability to pay. They only treat you enough so that you are no longer in immediate danger, and then they can kick you out. Given the choice between providing someone with $30 worth of drugs a month that will keep their condition under control forever, or letting their condition become life threatening and treating it with a $5000 emergency room visit every 2 or 3 months to just keep them alive--the US goes with the latter. Giving them a $30/month prescription would be socialism, and we can't have that.