First of all, in order to collect unemployment benefits in France, you must be actively looking for work. If you are being offered a job and don't take it, your benefits will be cut.
Second, you generally don't get 80% of your previous income. You get one of the following:
57.4% of your previous salary. 40.4% of your previous salary + 11.57 Euro per day, to a maximum of 75% of your previous salary, and no less than 28.21 Euro per day.
If you get 75% of your previous salary, then only because your income was pretty low to begin with.
(And I'm pretty sure there are more inaccuracies; the GP looks like it's been taken from some tabloid.)
As to who pays for it: The majority of social expenditures are actually for pensions and health. In 2005, France spent about 7.5% of its total social expenditures on unemployment [1] -- and the unemployment rate wasn't much lower back then -- as opposed to 37.4% on pensions and 29.8% on health (I note that France has one of the more efficient healthcare systems in the world, and a rather good one, too).
What a lot of people both in the US and the EU don't understand is that dealing with unemployment in a reasonable way is not actually all that expensive. Full benefits are generally only being paid for a short time, long-term benefits (subsistence level or slightly above) are not very expensive, and the structural costs of not doing it (such as increased crime rates) are probably more expensive in the long run.
16.5% really isn't a lot.
That's the cycle ---> rich country with strong middle class --> right-wing politicians get less and less popular/elected --> socialists/communists come --> poor country --> right-wing politicians are elected again
* 2/3 of your last wage for 1 year on unemployment, free health care
* After that expires you get your rent paid, free health care , and 400 euro per month for other expenses - indefinitely
On top of that everyone also gets free additional care when they are old / nursing home.
Also everyone gets a minimum pension once they reach 67 years of age.
Germany has the lowest youth unemployment in europe. it has one of the lowest overall unemployment rates in europe. it is one of the few countries that still had growth in the years past / is not deeply in recession.
Yeah, those are the perils of "socialism".
"According to a new research on working hours in countries of the European Union, Greeks work 42.2 hours per week. more than all other Europeans. The research was conducted by the National Statistical Service of Britain for the period April-June 2011. German people work 35.6 hours per week, French 38 hours, the British 36.3 hours, while the Irish only 35 hours. In addition, according to the same research, full-time workers in Greece and Austria are working more hours (43.7) than workers elsewhere in the EU" (from the Guardian).
2) Nope, they mostly got/get lots of unqualified immigrants. Not to mention that the integration of Eastern Germany post 1989 had an enormous cost that nearly toppled Germany's economy.
Only after the countries became prosperous, now there has been a political turn moderately to the right and towards some expansion of free-market policies and privatization (Denmark's particular version is called "flexicurity").
As far as I can tell, the Nordic countries had started to stagnate economically, with a lot of young people emigrating for better opportunities, hence people wanting to change things.
No. It's just what the civilised West (namely, Europe) calls "welfare state".
And it's very successful, when it's not fucked up by right wing politicians.
"Socialism" was what the old Eastern European countries had.
>That's the cycle ---> rich country with strong middle class --> right-wing politicians get less and less popular/elected --> socialists/communists come --> poor country --> right-wing politicians are elected again
Nope. The cycle is:
rich country with strong middle class --> social left politicians get less popular/elected neoliberals and right-wingers come --> poor country/fucked up middle class --> social left politicians are elected again.
The same way Reagan and Thatcher fucked up the American/UK economy and middle class, and the same way the economy did better under Clinton that under the republicans.
The successful welfare state you are talking about is already considered a failed model, because of the numerous people taking advantage of the system. I am quite sure you don't live in Europe...
Deadly serious:
"""Looking only at the core measure of economic performance – GDP growth – Thatcher's performance was slightly better than that of her predecessor, James Callaghan, but slightly worse than under Tony Blair, with average growth over her tenure standing at around 2.3% a year.
(...)
Perhaps the best look at what Thatcherism meant for British families comes from a series of measures calculated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which calculated household incomes after tax (and any income from benefits), and put them into monetary amounts relative to 2010-11 prices, stripping out the effects of inflation. These figures show families got richer. The median household – the household right in the middle, where half are richer, half are poorer – earned the equivalent of £270.74 a week in 1979. By 1990, this had increased by 26% to £341.58. But, as you would expect, these gains were nowhere near evenly distributed, and the poorest got the least. A family in the bottom 10% had a weekly income of £151.58 as Thatcher came into power. Eleven years later as she left Downing Street, the family had just £158.57 – a mere 4.6% more. The richest families – the top 10% – did far better, with their incomes increasing from the equivalent of £472.98 in 1979 to £694.83 in 1990.
(...)
Still, the poverty figures don't look good: the number of children in poverty almost doubled under Thatcher, from 1.7 million in 1979 to 3.3 million in 1990. Pensioner poverty in the same period increased too, from 3.1 million to 4.1 million. Those numbers rise still further if housing costs are factored in.
(...)
By the World Bank's measures, industry (including manufacturing) fell from contributing 40% of the UK's GDP in 1979 to just 34% in 1990 – and has since fallen more dramatically still to just under 22%. The consequences of deindustrialisation hit huge swaths of the UK, particularly Wales and northern England, hard. Unemployment soared from 5.3% in 1979 – a level high enough for the Conservatives' "Labour isn't Working" poster to go down in the annals of great election adverts – to peak at 11.9% in 1984. In 1990, the year of Thatcher's departure, it stood slightly higher than when her era began, at 6.9%."""
>The successful welfare state you are talking about is already considered a failed model, because of the numerous people taking advantage of the system. I am quite sure you don't live in Europe...
I very much live in Europe. And it's only considered a "failed model" by neo-liberals and private interests that want to demolish it. The people are very much for it.
In fact, the countries in Europe that are the most successful financially and socially, from Germany to the Skandinavian countries, are the ones with the best welfare states.
Most European countries have a free market economy with some sort of social safety net (that's the socialism right there). Communism has a planned economy, something which is unheard of in Europe at the moment (with the possible exception of Belarus). Also, some countries with strong social safety nets are doing rather well at keeping unemployment at bay. Think of the famous German Kurzarbeitergeld, where the state replaces a part of the pay of workers that work less due to temporary economic circumstances, thus avoiding layoffs.
My goodness, who pays for this?