Livret A: household savings called on to renovate high schools

According to franceinfo, the Prime Minister announced on Tuesday a rise in the livret A rate, without specifying the level, along with an increase in its ceiling, which could reach between 25,000 and 30,000 euros. The stated aim: devote part of this savings pot to renovating lycées (French secondary schools). According to franceinfo's headline, some of the French people interviewed say they are wary. The rest (rate, timetable, the share of funds earmarked for lycées) is not yet known.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The mechanism first. A livret A is not a dormant nest egg: the money deposited is pooled and reused, partly by the state and partly by the banking sector. Raising the ceiling means opening the tap wider. The state gets financing, and households get a "safe" investment. The question is who lends to whom: here it is employees advancing, with their savings, the means to fix the roofs of public institutions. Taxation, meanwhile, keeps a discreet profile.

Note the discretion of the procedure. Renovating lycées is a collective expense, one the budget could bear by levying where wealth accumulates. Instead, the government prefers to tap precautionary savings, the kind that covers a broken-down car or a month that goes wrong. Moreover, a ceiling of 25,000 or 30,000 euros raises a simple question: how many wage-earning households are even close to it? The biggest passbooks will also be the biggest beneficiaries of a higher rate. Those who save little will receive little.

This is where the wage relationship comes in. A wage covers the reproduction of the labour force; the work performed beyond that creates surplus value, the source of profit. When the share going to capital remains intact and workers are asked to finance their own collective facilities on credit, the burden shifts without anyone having to name it. Lycées train the future workforce: employers will benefit, and savers will front the bill.

The grammar of the announcement also deserves a closer look. We are told that "the savings of the French" will "irrigate" investment, as if money flowed by itself. Behind it lie decisions: not to raise taxes, to set a rate, to entrust part of the circuit to the banks. Relations between people appear here as relations between numbers.

The state is not a neutral arbiter here. It manages a balance: funding schools without touching the conditions of accumulation. The livret A is a convenient, popular and reassuring instrument for this. The wariness of the French people interviewed by franceinfo is therefore not irrational. It resembles the caution of someone offered the chance to pay in advance, at modest interest, for what they already finance through their contributions and taxes.

The details to come will show whether the scheme is a genuine lever for investment or an accounting sleight of hand. For now, one certainty: the lycées need work, and the choice has been to make those who cannot afford not to save cautiously pay for it first.