[TheRoque]

As a french person, I don't get why no politician ever talks about simplifying those things. It sounds so easy and such a quick win, leading to more visibility on the budget, and people getting easily access to their due money. But I think I know the answer: current government doesn't want to make welfare easy to access, they want to actually deter people to use it unless they absolutely need it.

[brnt]

If France is anything like the Netherlands, the benefits system isn't used by a few poor's, it's used by the majority of the country, instead of adapting tax codes. Simplifying it is going to (unintentionally and intentionally) hurt some groups, and nobody what's to be on the hook for it, despite it having been an increasingly large election theme.

France at least has a culture of constitutional reboots.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> current government doesn't want to make welfare easy to access, they want to actually deter people to use it unless they absolutely need it.

The more complex a system, the more skill and resources (ability, time, finances) it takes to navigate it.

Eventually, complexity serves to exclude everyone but people who are able to make a career out of pursuing benefits - who are also more likely to be fraudsters.

[croisillon]

some cabinets have had a "ministère de la simplification"

[addcommitpush]

It's quite simple I think:

1. for any given budget, there is no Pareto-improving reallocation: if you want to give more money to someone, then the money has to come from someone else.

2. given the current complexity, there are a _lot_ of edge cases to account for. If you do not want to make any loser after a reform, and not have as many edge cases, then you'd need to pump a lot of money to a lot of people so that "edge case people" who become "average joe" do not lose out. See for instance the people who end up with less disposable income when their pension is raised (https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/vrais-faux-gagnants-...) (!). See also the riffraff about the "montant net social" - now the exact income (which is basically net salary + a bunch of things your employer pay for you and are counted as income) you need to report on welfare application is written on pay slip. Nice simplification here, right? People who reported wrong income (only net salary generally) were upset that it was a plot to decrease welfare.

3. people genuinely genuinely love special cases. Hence the tradeoff for the government between adressing a special case but adding more complexity always end up with more special cases, more complexity.

Some examples: since housing is expensive, people want to help renters with cash payment (of course it can't be bundled with the basic income, it has to be its own benefit), but they also want some public housing with below market rents. Now you need to acocunt for the in kind benefit of having a below market rent in the rules of housing benefits if you want to be relatively just between those two populations.

Recently, the cash benefit for handicaped people computation was changed - it depends only on the receiver's income and not on household's income (the main argument was that household income as an input makes handicapped less autonomous on one hand, and decreases working incentives for them). Now this means that some benefits are computed at the individual level, other at the household level. Of course there is a transitory period where people can be grandfathered-in the old rules so as not to make any losers.

And so on and so forth.

Large families need their own benefits, because they have unique(tm) needs, you just can't make a per child benefit that just scale.

And so on and so forth.

Did I mention that you want to help overseas territories with special fiscal rules?

And so on and so forth.

I think the two most prominent examples of this were the two failed Macron reform: the first pension reform (universal public pension fund instead of several) and the basic income (revenu universel d'activité - basically a merger of APL+RSA+PA at least). Always a special category that lose out if they own complexity-inducing special case is ironed out.

4. because of points 1-4, no one understands anything and thus there is a strong suspicision that the government is here to rob you of [your benefits | your pension | etc] when there is a reform proposal.