French Nobel laureate in economics Jean Tirole warns against Marine Le Pen’s economic program, which he says is “concealing and unfunded” and “will permanently impoverish our country”in a column published on Saturday in The Midi Dispatch .
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“Marine Le Pen’s program is a Prévert-style list of additional expenditure, greatly underestimated at 68 billion euros per year, financed with the help of unfortunately partly fictitious revenue”says the winner of the prize awarded by the Bank of Sweden in 2014.
According to him, the 16 billion euros in savings that Marine Le Pen says she wants to make thanks to immigration measures are “a calculation that is based on wind: all the studies show that immigrants cost almost nothing in terms of public money, because the social security contributions of those who work compensate for the costs charged to our social protection system”.
Also wondering how the far-right candidate will achieve “8 billion in savings on the functioning of the State”he believes, like the Montaigne Institute before him, that “the cost of its spending program seems very underestimated”.
“Lowering the retirement age to 60 will bankrupt our system, with significant consequences for the most disadvantaged”says Jean Tirole while the RN candidate wants to reinstate this starting age for those who started working between 17 and 20 years old.
Marine Le Pen’s proposals will not allow “neither to prepare for the future, nor to reduce inequalities”according to the economist who takes as an example the exemption from income tax for those under 30, which would also apply to a high graduate “winning five times the minimum wage”.
“Frexit which does not say its name”
Noting that despite a public debt that has fallen from 100% to nearly 116% of GDP due to the health crisis, France has not lost the confidence of the markets, he anticipates that “the lack of foresight of Marine Le Pen’s program will not reassure the latter, who will see in France a European version of Argentina”.
Finally, if the RN candidate “no longer talking about leaving Europe and the euro, his program amounts to sitting on European rules and will immediately create a deep crisis in the Union, with immediate repercussions on France’s budgetary credibility”warns the Nobel Prize for which it would be “of a Frexit that does not say its name”.