Five questions on the "universal income of activity" announced by Emmanuel Macron

Formerly presented under the name of "social single payment", this future social benefit gathers colossal stakes. Explanations.

Eleven years after the creation of the active solidarity income (RSA), a new "universal income of activity" will be born in 2020. This is one of the announcements made by Emmanuel Macron when he presented his " poverty plan ", Thursday 13 September. While the contours of this measure are still to be clarified, this is a large-scale project, which should concern millions of beneficiaries and which already raises many questions. Here is what we know for the moment.

1.     What does Emmanuel Macron propose?

Income paid automatically under income and "activity" conditions

The Head of State presented the "universal income of activity" as an aid "which merges the greatest possible number of benefits, and of which the State will be entirely responsible". The idea is that many social benefits will be combined into one, paid in one go. The future single allocation could come into existence in 2020, knowing that this is a large-scale project: today, the various social benefits are managed by different organizations, each of which manages the beneficiaries' files. , with often different rules. The unification of social assistance therefore also implies harmonizing these conditions and creating a "one-stop-shop" to centralize requests and ensure payments afterwards.

The big news for the recipients of this income is that they will be able to receive it automatically as soon as their income "falls below a certain threshold".

It will be conditional on "homework" on the part of the beneficiaries: there will be a "registration requirement in an insertion path, which prevents refusing more than two reasonable offers of employment or activity contained in his contract "Said the head of state.

Emmanuel Macron did not specify the envisaged amount of this income, but he said he wished he could "allow everyone to live decently".

2.   Which services will be affected?

A list to be defined, but which should contain social minima and more specific help

Emmanuel Macron did not detail the list of the merged aid, simply said want to meet "the largest number of social benefits, RSA APL." The Minister of Solidarity and Health, Agnès Buzyn, said on France Inter Friday that there would be a consultation "in the next six months" to define the list of allocations and "what will be [it]" the universal income of activity in itself.

The question is complex because there are dozens of social benefits in different spheres today: aid to health, family, the purchase of energy, employment, farmers, people in situation of disability, asylum seekers, student grants ... They are paid by multitudes of organizations and are not all national. Traditionally, there are two sets:

The ten social minimums (active solidarity income, allowance for disabled adults, solidarity allowance for the elderly, etc.), which are not intended for the same population groups, are paid to 4.8 million people to enable them to have a minimum of resources to live;

Social protection as a whole, which includes more specific support and, in the broad sense, benefits the entire population.

As Emmanuel Macron mentioned the LPAs in his speech, his universal income from activity would not only include social minima, but also benefits that hitherto concerned wider audiences.

3. Will there be "losers"?

Yes, unless you invest much more in social protection

It is impossible to quantify for now the cost of the future universal income of activity without knowing the precise modalities. Will it be an income with a single or variable amount depending on different parameters? And for what amounts? What will be the ceiling of resources to benefit from it? These are all crucial questions to understand the issues of reform.

On the other hand, it is known that paying social benefits automatically, and thus putting an end to non-recourse, has a cost. Just for the RSA, it would be in billions of euros. It is estimated today that at least 30% of potential beneficiaries of the basic RSA do not perceive it. The simple fact of paying the RSA to all those who are really entitled to it would thus represent a cost of at least 3 billion euros per year (the base RSA represented expenditures of 10.4 billion in 2015). If this reform is done without increasing the social assistance budget in France, the government will have to save money on it in another way. Which, mechanically, would make "losers". In this regard, a recent report by France Stratégie, an independent think-tank affiliated to Matignon, showed that such a reform carried out with a constant budget for the state would make millions of "winners", but also millions of "losers".

Emmanuel Macron himself recognized this risk in his speech on Thursday:

"We have to take the time to analyze, to consult, sometimes mistakes were made on these beautiful ideas, I look on the other side of the Channel, the merger of many benefits led to reduce the rights of some of them and, basically, create new problems, and we have to analyze very directly, very methodically, what made others fail, sometimes what made us fail when we wanted to do that. "

4. Is it really a "universal income"?

One-time, automatic payment, not a "universal" income

The concept of "universal income" has been widely popularized during the 2017 presidential campaign, sometimes at random. Originally, proponents of a universal income, such as the French Movement for a Basic Income, defended a very specific idea:

     an unconditional income (which does not require the fulfillment     of specific criteria);

     universal (which is for everyone);

     individual (which is paid to individuals and not to homes);

     cumulative with other aids or income;

     automatic (which should not be requested);

     permanent (which is paid continuously, throughout life).

However, Emmanuel Macron's "universal income from activity" is, for example, neither unconditional, nor truly universal, nor quite cumulative with other income. The presidential idea only really ticks one of the boxes above: that of an automatic payment. This is also why Emmanuel Macron's program spoke of a "single and automatic social payment", a formulation that better reflected the substance of this proposal.

5. What other proposals exist?

Several presidential candidates in 2017, on the other hand, defended the idea of a universal income more in line with the initial philosophy of the project. Thus, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet proposed to pay, unconditionally, 470 euros per month to all French over 18 years and between 200 to 270 euros before. The ecologist Yannick Jadot even envisaged an income "from the birth" of 500 euros per month, combined with a major reform of the tax system.

The case of Benoît Hamon is more questionable. If the former presidential candidate criticized Emmanuel Macron on Thursday on his "desire to recover, sign a proposal that is already made", he himself somewhat stalled on the subject during his campaign. Party with the proposal to pay 750 euros per month to any person major (a "true" universal income), Benoît Hamon had then reworked several times his proposal. Its latest version was very far from the initial philosophy, since it was no longer a universal aid but limited under conditions of resources (below 1.9 smic).

The will of the government to establish for all beneficiaries of the RSA, which will become the RUA, the obligation not to refuse two job offers "reasonable".

Which immediately exposes the diversion of language used to name the new device to replace the RSA, since in Universal Income Activity, "Universal" meant precisely "unconditional" in the proposals of Universal Basic Income. So it is a recovery of the idea of Universal Basic Income to divert it and bring it into the old framework that conditions the obtaining of an income to a defined behavior. This is an unprecedented setback since the RSA was set up specifically to meet the needs of people who are no longer entitled to unemployment benefits, and secondly cannot find (for reasons of health or other) or do not find a job. It is therefore necessary to harden the conditions for obtaining the RSA (RUA) to eject even more people from the device.

On the other hand, the qualification of "reasonable" expresses here the legal arbitrariness thus imposed. For who will decide that an offer is "reasonable" or not? According to what criteria? It has already been experimented with Pôle Emploi that the criteria adopted are totally disconnected from the realities: too often, what seems feasible to the advisor is not feasible for the person concerned. For example, forced employment requires a rural vehicle in working order. If the person does not have the means to have his vehicle repaired or changed, it will fail quickly and end up not only unable to get to the place of his employment, but also unable to do so. to go shopping or go to the doctor. So his precarious situation will get worse.

Between the representations of the reality of the advisers and the reality lived by the beneficiaries, there is an abyss that we must imperatively reveal to the public opinion if we do not want to finish even more precarious.

SAISI