The Mobi is Germany’s mobility bonus, funding that covers moving, relocation and retraining costs for unemployed Germans seeking work anywhere in the world.
Plagued by high unemployment due to the turmoil of
re-unification and rigid labour laws, Germany has been helping
its skilled and less-skilled jobless workers match up with
foreign employers searching for manpower.The country has also been offering financial support to
cover moving and transportation costs for the hordes of
unemployed Germans in search of jobs across the European Union,
and even as far away as Australia and Canada.
The mobility bonus strikes me as a move of desperation. The Germans have created a bloated welfare state and now they are paying people to get off the welfare rolls and get out. I wonder what Rawls would have said?
Even now, I see an opportunity for America:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
> The Germans have created a bloated welfare state and now they are paying people to get off the welfare rolls and get out.
Just like GM buys out employees from their pension obligations…I wonder if that will end up being offered in the US. Accept a one-time payout for Medicare and/or Social Security and be off the system for good.
Take all those lazy, uneducated people. I do not know what you want with them but we pay to get rid of them and there is a good reason for it….
I’m not sure many tired and poor Germans are going to be rushing off to the US to work in Walmart. Furthermore, German unemployment is a bit more complicated than you make out and there is no compelling evidence that a strong welfare state leads to high unemployment either. As you well know. This was little more than a troll post.
I like to pretend that the internet is a force for good.
Let me make sure I’m getting this correctly:
1. The state gets to safe money by helping people to get back into work.
2. People get to increase their income by getting back into work.
3. That’s a bad thing.
Er?
You can always count on a ‘well meaning’ government to accelerate a pending crisis. The story does not say how often these entitlements are given and what are the criteria but it sounds not ‘im ordnung’.
People cheer the US recession and hope for total economic collapse of the US and the proletariat rising from the ashes to overthrow the powers that be, or at least bask in schadenfreude of the falling dollar and rising euro as indicative of the success of the EU model, but everybody forgets the aging of Europe and the impending social/pension crisis that may follow, much worse than the pending US social security crisis since by some calculations the average age in Europe will be 52 years old by 2050 while the median age of Americans will be around 35 years old. But the EU commission isn’t stupid, it may eventually FORCE heartless private investment “American style reforms” if the leaders continually dodge these issues.
I’ve often thought this would be an acceptable way to deal with Detroit and NOLA citizens that want to get out and on with their lives.
Alex says: “The mobility bonus strikes me as a move of desperation. The Germans have created a bloated welfare state”
I think you’re economic assumptions may be a bit out of date. Although the US economy was more dynamic the Europe in the 1990s, in recent years, the employment rates for Western Europe and the US have more or less equalized. In fact, employment rates in France and the welfare states of Scandinavia is higher than in the US, with Germany just a hair lower. Italy brings the average down for western Europe. The closing gap partly reflects higher employment rates in Germany and the rest of Europe, and partly reflects lower employment rates in the US.
See
http://www.cepr.net/documents/europe_2006_09_19.pdf
and http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/jobless-men/
Nein, nein,
This is not desperate but desirable. We used to pay for the poor to go to Australia. Australia has had a program to move to unemployed over to Perth to get jobs (I think?). This to me looks like an even more liberal approach by the Germans; not desperate but rather uber rational and liberal.
In fact its part of a trend which your yankfreude is obscuring.
A couple of German banks ran into subprime problems; they were allowed to go bust. A US broker got into trouble and was bailed out. German tax as share of GDP is falling and is now lower than the UK. In the US its likely to rise somewhat over the next few years in light of the response to the recession and the probable repeal of the Bush tax cuts.
It’s the Germans who are heading the right direction these days.
“I wonder if that will end up being offered in the US. Accept a one-time payout for Medicare and/or Social Security and be off the system for good.”
I seeeeriously doubt that it would ever happen, because it would put the lie to Medicare and SS being anything but wealth redistribution, but I would be first in line for my (small) buyout.
I would also glean an unhealthy amount of happiness from such an event.
I’m with Giles. Have you never heard of Haartz IV? Were you unaware that there is no national or regional minimum wage in Germany? That many people earn €5/hour for reasonably skilled retail jobs? Are you still stuck in the “sclerotic Europe/dynamic US” false dichotomy?
And Rex’s suggestion that the language issue is just a matter of a few months at Berlitz is completely misinformed. You need much more competence at a language than that, to work in a professional job. I should know: I am a native English speaker living in a German-speaking country and working for an organisation where both English and German are spoken. I speak reasonable conversational German, but I would never dream of writing a report in my professional sphere in German. And Americans do NOT generally study foreign languages (except maybe Spanish) at school up to the level that Europeans learn English, nor are they exposed to those languages day in day out in popular culture (think song lyrics).
I’m a bit confused. Which is a better comparison, unemployment figures or jobless figures? Tom and the OECD point out that US unemployment is low compared to Western European countries(4.6% as stated above). Krugman and Floyd Norris from NYT point out that the jobless rate (which supposedly counts ALL those without jobs) is high:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/jobless-men/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/business/12charts.html?_r=2&ref=business&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
I’m getting the impression that anyone can pick and choose the numbers to push their respective barrows.
It’s certainly reasonable to say that the general picture has gotten worse in the U.S. and better in Germany in the last year, but Student’s claims go way too far. First, he widens the comparison area from Germany to Western Europe, which significantly dilutes the comparison by drawing in boom-regions like Ireland and Spain with very differnet unemployment regiemes. Second, and most importantly, he ignores a glaring difference between unemployment in the U.S. and Germany — the vast majority of U.S. unemployment is short-term (less than 1 year), whereas in Germany the majority of unemployment is long-term. Put differently, unemployment in the U.S. is mostly a problem is bumps in income, but unemployment in Germany is mostly a problem of a permanently unemployed underclass. That has everything to do with the structure of Germany unemployment benefits. (Until not too long ago, Germany unemployment benefits were a fixed percentage of your former salary, paid forever.)
An important bit of cultural background is that Germans are culturally incredibly non-mobile compared to Americans. German unemployment law has supported this trait by not requiring people to move to find new employment. (Again until not too long ago, if the unemployment office found you a job in the same profession at the same salary as your previous job, if you would have to move to accept it you were allowed to refuse it without loosing your benefits.) So it’s quite fair for Alex to present this as a case of the government offering you a benefit, then paying you not to take it.
Only in MR would you have people arguing that “my country is more capitalist friendly than yours!”
Not sceloritic??(for now I guess):
Immigration numbers:
Germany: 661855 in – 639064 out = 22791 (2006)
The lowest amount in 15 years.
“By 2050, every third German will be over 60 years old. ”
Andrew:
Germany also has entrenched redistribution to poorer provinces — it’s called the “Laenderfinanzausgleich”.
Hartz IV is certainly a policy movement in the same direction as Clinton’s welfare reform, but it’s hardly landing at the same place. I’d say Germany after Hartz IV is in about the same place as the U.S. before Clinton’s welfare reform. (Also, there is a lot of backsliding occuring on the implementation of Hartz IV.)
I agree that Germany’s safety net with the Mobi is better than without it — it’s a desperately needed incentive to get citizens off the dole and moving for work. But a much better reform would be to remove the incentives that kept citizens stationary and on the dole in the first place: the principle of east-west wage equality and absurdly generous unemployment benefits.
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