Sometimes I wonder whether Vile Pin and l'Escroc have been taking stupid pills. Either that or they are related to the House of Bourbon - the royal family that famously never learned anything and never forgot anything. The CPE sank in part on the fact that there was no debate about it and no attempt to analyse or explain the reasoning behind it. So having killed the CPE on Monday, the Fench parliament approved "son of CPE" under the same conditions of no-debate.
PARIS (AFP) - The French parliament has approved a bill replacing a contested youth contract, after President Jacques Chirac's government buckled to months of pressure in which millions took to the streets.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's contested First Employment Contract (CPE), which would have made it easier to fire young people, is to be replaced with state subsidies to encourage companies to take on unqualified young staff.
The bill was passed Wednesday by 151 votes to 93, in a lower house National Assembly dominated by the ruling centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), and is expected to be rubber-stamped by the Senate on Thursday.
Astoundingly the students and unions think that the new approach - in which the government bribes employers to employ the otherwise unemployable - is a good thing. Ignoring the fact that government attempts to rig markets have almost always been failures and the question of where exactly the money to pay for this is going to come from, if this measure is successful it seems likely that what will happen is that employers will simply exchange marginally educated but subsidized workers for unsubsidized but slightly better educated ones - i.e. the bottom ranks of students (and union members) - precisely the ones who just protested the CPE.
So congratulations morons. You have either forced the government to waste a lot of money that it doesn't have - and which it is unlikely to retrieve from higher tax revenues - or ensured that you don't even get a McJob when you finish your studies, or both. Fortunately for the morons, but not so for the unemployed of the banlieues, I'm going to bet that few employers take up the offer of dosh for hiring Ahmed or Diadou. You see the employers aren't stupid and realize that getting that government subsidy is bound to take about 500 pages of bureaucratic form-filling and responses to questions from fonctionnaires who don't understand that time spent pushing paper is time that is not spent making money.