Social Mathematical Insecurity
I stumbled upon this article in La Tribune about how great and marvelous and fantastic is the French Social Security in reducing its abysmal deficit by cutting costs and increasing efficiency mainly through increasing technology usage.
The journalist (I have no word to describe the person who wrote this piece, except for Propagandist may be) glorifies the Social Security for actually reducing its own costs from 3,6% of spendings in 2005 to a mere 3,07% in 2010. That is great. Everybody applause. Our people are doing good work here. We’re saved.
Alas, numbers are hard to manipulate and they don’t lie, most of the time. Let’s put some numbers here so that you have a clearer view:
(in billion euros) 2005 2010
Social Security Spendings 265,5 318,5
% of internal costs 3,6% 3,07%
Internal costs 9,6 9,8
Social Security Deficit -11,9 -26,5
As we can see, the Social Security spendings went from 265,5 to 318,5 billion euros between 2005 and 2010. People in France are really sick you know.
So if you apply the % of spendings to the actual spendings, one can see that the spendings in fact INCREASED from 9,6 to 9,8 billion euros. That’s only +2% but still, it’s an increase, not a decrease at all.
In the meantime, I have to mention that the Social Security deficit went from -11,9 to -26,6 billion euros. The increase in internal costs is only a tiny fraction of this incredible waste that has the potential to destroy our country, no less.
As a conclusion, let’s make it clear that a couple of people are trying to fool the La Tribune reader and, beyond them, the citizens of France:
- one is Dominique Libault, Director of Sécurité sociale,
- the other is Sara Sampaio, the “journalist” from La tribune.
It may work next time guys. Just pimp up your numbers a little bit more.
