Obama: Hey, You Know Who Has This Economics & Workers' Rights Thing All Figured Out? France Does, That's Who

Before launching into his idea of making the capitalist America more like the socialist France, Obama offered this Obamaism -- one of his patented Fun Facts that perfectly illustrates the political agenda he's agitating for, which is as emotionally potent as it is kinetically deceptive.

"Many women can't even get a paid day off to give birth -- now that's a pretty low bar," Obama said at the White House Summit on Working Families. "That, we should be able to take care of."

There is some truth in this claim -- an hourly worker who is only paid when she's actually at work will not be paid when she's not.

But that's rather obvious, isn't it? And of course Obama has created many more hourly workers due to the economic disincentives of Obamacare.

The president is touting paid maternity in the midst of a midterm election campaign focused on women voters, without describing the details of how he would fund such a system. "If France can figure this out, we can figure this out," Obama said.

France has figured many things out, of course, including how to create a sickly economy in permanent recession.

France provides some of the most far-reaching worker rights in the developed world, including limiting a standard work week at 35 hours and providing 16 weeks of paid maternity leave.

France also has an unemployment rate that has hovered above 10 percent for more than two years, well above the rate of unemployed in the United Kingdom and the United States, which are both in the 6 percent range.

Obama then made sure everyone understood which side he was on in the #WarOnWomen that breaks out every two years:

...

The president filled his remarks with appeals to working moms, talking at length about his role in caring for daughters Malia and Sasha when they were infants and both he and first lady Michelle Obama worked full time.

When dads rearrange their schedules to leave early to go to a parent-teacher conference, “everybody in the office says, 'Oh, isn't that nice?'" he said. "And then when women do it, everybody is all 'Like, y'know, is she really committed to the job?'"

Because Society.

American politicians, even Democrats, don't frequently hail France as an economic marvel, as they don't want the public to know that they are covertly socialist.

But Obama is now unleashed and feels more comfortable telling the world what he has always believed.

Incidentally, France knows how to do something else, too: Arrange a system of economic punishment for success so severe that polls consistently say that 80-90 percent of its young people with marketable degrees wish to leave the country entirely.

More than 70 per cent of the French feel taxes are "excessive", and 80 per cent believe the president’s economic policy is "misguided" and "inefficient". ...

Worse, after decades of living in one of the most redistributive systems in western Europe, 54 per cent of the French believe that taxes – of which there have been 84 new ones in the past two years, rising from 42 per cent of GDP in 2009 to 46.3 per cent this year – now widen social inequalities instead of reducing them.

...

By 2014, France’s public expenditure will overtake Denmark’s to become the world’s highest: 57 per cent of GDP....

Today, one out of four French university graduates wants to emigrate, "and this rises to 80 per cent or 90 per cent in the case of marketable degrees", says economics professor Jacques Régniez, who teaches at both the Sorbonne and the University of New York in Prague. "In one of my finance seminars, every single French student intends to go abroad."

Incidentally, a French politician has a terrific new idea that I hope Obama doesn't hear about, because he might just decide to emulate it:

Arnaud Montbourg just had a big new idea to bring about a bright future: imposing financial penalties for every job "not created."

"On job creation, we have asked for financial penalties: 50,000 Euros per job not created," [he told an interviewer].

Thanks to @comradearthur for that last item.

posted by Ace at 02:58 PM

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