I literally had an argument the other day about triple locked pensions, and we have something similar to the UK in Australia, but here the aged pension is more a safety net than a retirement plan, since most people will self fund in future. Anyway the triple locked pensions are insane, I fully support pensions being indexed to wages, however indexing it to the larger of the two is disgustingly unfair to younger people, where necessarily pensions will continue to grow as a burden mathematically against incomes.
Now France just indexes to CPI from what I can see, but the overall entitled thought process of older people is similar and insane. You can't have it all you can't have extremely high house prices, infinite money and care workers coming to your house without expecting some push back from the people paying for all this.
Triple lock is so incredibly stupid i can't fathom how someone could ever think it's a good idea. It's setup to be a cancer that only grows until it kills its host nation.
> Triple lock is so incredibly stupid i can't fathom how someone could ever think it's a good idea. It's setup to be a cancer that only grows until it kills its host nation.
It's not a good idea; it's that generation voting to get "theirs" and not giving a fuck about anyone else.
> Triple lock is so incredibly stupid i can't fathom how someone could ever think it's a good idea.
For the UK, at the time it was introduced, it was a good idea. Growth was never predicted to be stagnant, and we had some of the worst pensioner poverty of a developed country.
But since it's introduction, we've had stagflation effectively, aging population, revolution in how industries and employment works, and unforeseeable issues in health and care (no genuinely).;
Triple lock at it's introduction was a good idea, but long overdue a change.
Well I am curious as a non British person: did the triple lock already included when it was introduced a sunset clause, or a forced revision clause?
Something like « after 20 years of triple lock the triple lock expires, or require to be voted again, or the index goes to best of the three to average of the three… ». Not an automatic kick the can mechanism…
Because if it was not included when it was introduced it was not a good idea. Such legislation when you can easily see the damaging effect in 20 years at a need a stop gap to truly be a good idea.
> Well I am curious as a non British person: did the triple lock already included when it was introduced a sunset clause, or a forced revision clause?
I honestly don't know, but usually our laws do not have those kind of clauses unless the law was created for some specific timebound issue (COVID). They just become issues for successive governments to deal with and reform.
Anyone who thinks growth will continue forever should be taken out back. The resulting lack of brain activity would probably improve the average intelligence.
We could have far more growth but we have over-regulated everything and given everyone an effective veto on everything with judicial reviews etc that can drag pretty much anything you want to do out until its not worth doing any more.
Definitely feels more like rule of lawyers than rule of law. Everything is now Jarndyce vs Jarndyce so we have shrinking industry, shrinking growth etc. Bleak House was supposed to be a warning not a blueprint for a whole society
We don't need infinite growth but the current enforced stagnation is a choice
I was a child in the 90s and remember news report about pensioners in extreme poverty, literally starving/freezing to death. And they were genuinely the WW2 generation - there was a lot of public support for treating them better, as well as (arguably) a moral imperative. As you say, it's the 30 years since that have made it so irrational, but so hard for a party that wants to win an election to change. The outrage about just means testing the winter fuel allowance was ridiculous.
In France, the average pensioner has a higher income than the average worker. Not is better off because of saved wealth. INCOME. That’s truly insane and the entire country riots anytime anyone tries to fix anything. I honestly don’t see this getting better before it gets way, way worse.
My grandmother is 89 and has almost 3000€/month (2000 from hers, + 1000 from half of my deceased grandfather's pension, because yes, ex-public servant has this), and she retired at 55.
It's good for her but this is just crazy when you think about it just 2 seconds
Pensions rise by inflation, wage growth, or 2.5% - whichever is highest.
The idea was to get more pensioners out of poverty inline with a growing economy.
It wasn't necessarily a stupid policy. A growing economy would have wages rising faster than inflation, inflation rising because wages were rising (thus taxation rising in either case), or 2.5% if neither.
In reality, inflation rose because of COVID and war, and wages are being held back because of (effectively) corporate greed, taxation traps (frozen personal allowance in the UK, £100k trap, etc.), and taxation loopholes (offshoring companies.)
Every policy idea has issues, and these are the issues of the triple lock.
it was, as it was predicated on pie in the sky bullshit, where nothing ever goes wrong.
Every few years you have either an economic slump, an inflation spike without a matching wage growth for a myriad of reasons.
This policy makes it almost guaranteed that in a downturn pensions actually get ahead compared to the productive parts of the economy, who fund them in the first place.
Times are good = move in lockstep, times are bad = get ahead. Not to mention the pensions are one of major things strangling the economy in an aging society and affecting the very indicators that control them, so it's a self-reinforcing loop in practice.
“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” - James Carville
Maybe you can intimidate politician into compliance, but nobody cows the long-duration bond market. Not when it is activated, at least. Sure, you can control it while it’s passive, but that is not the case now. It has the final say, over everyone, period.
As we are now seeing with Trump's disastrous attacks on the US fiscal situation. We were promised he would slash at least a trillion if not two from spending when he allowed Musk to run amok through the government stealing data and firing non MAGA "excess" employees rendering services like the VA far less able to complete their missions. All the while not reducing spending but vastly increasing it, and adding illegal tariffs to the cost of living which was later reimbursed to corporations who kept it and the new price structure when it was consumers that paid the goddamned taxes in the first place. Then he deteriorated the economic outlook even further by starting an idiotic unwinnable war with Iran that not only nearly doubled fuel prices but is actively breaking the energy supply chains.
The results. I refied my house at 5.6% in April and now the average mortgage rate at closing is an average APR of 7.57 so just another way we get to pay for his demented incompetence. And by the way, I honestly believe it is not demented incompetence but fulfilling orders from his boss in Moscow.
That's not necessarily true. There is always the path of Argentina.
Prosperity is always a political choice. Right now, it seems that most leaders of developed democracies are going to side with pensioners and special interest lobbies over the requirements for prosperity, even knowing the crisis that it will cause.
They can’t print like Argentina can. They are beholden to the bond market like everyone else in the eu. If prosperity was a choice, everyone would be prosperous…
Prosperity is always a choice. It just has tradeoffs that people are often unwilling to accept. For example, if France wants to become a prosperous country it can't be a highly regulated economy that funnels 40% of GDP to give boomers pensions that are higher than the income of the average worker.
France is unwilling to accept this compromise so they have and will continue to choose to not be a prosperous country.
Not drinking is a choice but alcoholics still exist, right? Nothing stops France from once again taking their spot on the world stage as the envy of most if not all except for their own decisions on how they want their country to work, and the relationships between people, government, business, work, and spending.
The reason Britain won the Napoleonic wars was because of its bond market. Napoleon couldn’t borrow due to France’s lack of creditworthiness, so had to rely on appropriation, especially from conquered territories. That worked when he was winning, but once he started losing…
He also tried to win that broader war of conquest by cutting off trade ties. Which also worked out very, very poorly, as historians have generally seen it.
The Continental System's mercantilist premises (tolerant of export but intolerant of import) proved flawed. It damaged domestic industrial sectors reliant on import/export. And strategically, it alienated (or even made enemies of) allies.
Now, as for the United States, the present administration did not invent the phenomenon of the US trying to dictate who its closest allies trade with. But with this chaotic overreaching, it may have managed to substantially destroy its capacity to do so in the near future, by overreaching so far that its allies are forced to simply ignore American threats and seek expansion of alternative trade ties elsewhere (just as the Continental System promoted the expansion of British trade in the Caribbean and Americas).
I have noticed both the average Redditor and the average Twitter user wildly underestimate the power of having good credit as a nation. Destabilizing the way you obtain easy credit is one of the most stupid mistakes any country can make. The ability to borrow money is quite literally everything.
I think it's a shame that really no country has been able to "pay down the debt", and it seems every country has become addicted to social spending. I wonder where Canada might be if they had privatized social security in the 2000's, but it seems too late now for anyone
You pay down the debt in good times so you can borrow in bad times and stimulate the economy.
If you never pay down your debt the debt balloons to unmanageable levels and you have interest payments greater that take up a huge chunk of your budget. See Greece circa 2008 or USA right now
There is no need to pay it down ever. All you need is for new debt to be equal or less than nominal economic growth and for markets to believe that this could be maintained into the future. The USA for example, assuming 2% inflation and 2% real GDP growth may easily run deficits of $1-1.2T indefinitely without problems.
The main problem for France now is, and for Greece 15 years ago was slow growth and the fact that they do not issue their own currency.
The point of paying down debt is to have better credit.
And it doesn't have to be a literal reduction in total debt to zero. Rather few people even propose that. Rather, slowing debt growth so that it lags GDP growth will reduce total effective debt load and make people more willing to lend.
Cap spending, tax, and reduce effective debt during boom years. Borrow during bad years. It's a fine sounding strategy that has been proposed by people smarter than me.
And what would happen then? Bond markets add further % to rates. The French fight each other over the resources that are diminishing faster than before resulting in the unraveling of order, and destruction of welfare. Until at some point, some politician finds a way to stabilise society at a level of welfare that’s likely a lot lower than it was before. At some point after stabilisation, France will want new debt and at that point they have to show finances that make it sensible for money to be lent to them. It would be a lot easier to skip the societal upheaval and go directly towards solutions as it would cause less strife and result in less compromise.
I’ve seen a lot of French hint that the French will start some sort of a revolution as a vague threat against its allies meant to motivate them to pay France’s excess bills. If it comes to that, it’s the French that would lose the most. And for what? Because the French don’t want to make small compromises with other French? The situation is still entirely in the hands of the French. Rates are not yet too high and things could be sorted if the French work together to solve them.
That some French really think the next step should be some sort of intervention so that they don’t need to make slightly uncomfortable decisions shows a total lack of humility and that attitude, if it persists, would result in a course of action that’s worse for the French in every metric. It’s better for the French to decide by themselves—not let some other institution like the IMF decide. This speculation over a self-inflicted martyrdom equates too closely with how teens engage with troubles they face.
You should probably zoom out, and realize that you're claiming that France has a net negative production here.
> so that they don’t need to make slightly uncomfortable decisions
I mean, the protesters have been very plain that what they want is France to roll back the recent tax cut for the wealthy. Somehow that is unthinkable, while austerity is just "slightly uncomfortable"?
That is not how bonds work. Suppose a revolutionary government takes over. The new government says French government bonds now pay 2%, whereas the previous market rate was 6%. Well, people can simply don’t buy the French government bonds at 2%.
Now, this new government could force people to buy French government bonds at 2%. Well, France would cease to be a liberal state where people have rights 🤷♀️
Eh, the rights and systems the revolution brought were so popular that not even the Restoration was dumb enough to reverse them. Repeated protests during the Restoration caused them to reinstate a bunch more as time went on.
All in all, despite the problems that came with it, the revolution was absolutely a positive for 90% of the population. The nobility, ethnic minorities and victims of vigilante justice were the main sufferers.
It's amazing how much the popular narrative of the French Revolution ignores this, as it was probably the reason for most of the deaths even in the Reign of Terror. It wasn't primarily the mob run crazy - it was just as much Paris putting control onto the rest of the country, down to language.
It was pretty bad for the millions that died in the 25 years of nonstop wars that followed.
And all they got for all that was to get the king back. Two more revolutions, an empire and more wars followed before they achieved democray after 1870. Compare those 80 years with Britain who achieve democracy around the same time with much less instability and bloodshed.
My reading of history is that the revolution was a disaster for the people who lived it as well as their children and their grandchildren. Not to mention for the rest of Europe. The Dutch for example had a prosperous republic for over 200 years already and the end result of the French revolution was them getting a king. Napoleon also abolished a bunch of prosperous German and Italian republics and triggered the nationalism that ended up as an even bigger disaster for all of Europe 150 years later.
Markets are not fundamental and all operate under a sovereign licence. Laws/rules create the market structures and dictate market power. Change the laws relating to the market, and you change the nature of the market itself
You can’t force lenders to give you money at a low premium if instead you’re very risky. And you can’t print infinite money without causing inflation. Even if you write a law banning inflation lol.
All the really important markets are of international character, and France, with its total economy size of 2-3 percent of the global GDP, cannot really "dictate" anything on the global scene. They can't even dictate production of their own currency, as the ECB is in Frankfurt and will not obey.
You can't alter the free market with laws and rules.
Supply and demand will always win out
Edit: if France passes any laws to reduce its liability for bonds already issued, do you think future bondholders will continue to lend to France? If yes, it will be a significantly higher interest rates
And? Again, France is currently addicted to borrowing and if it cannot live within its own means, it will have to adjust its laws to whatever French creditors can tolerate.
No nation that goes on a debt spree is truly sovereign.
You're right if only france could raise more revenue perhaps pay down its debt? Maybe that would help stabilize their bond market... If only there was some way.....
Too bad restoring the corporate tax rate to 50% like it was before 1986 is simply impossible and every politician who even mentions it turns into dust like avengers endgame whenever they utter the words "corporate tax hike" or rather "une hausse de l’impôt sur les sociétés."
Ah yes, you seem to be commenting on the relatively high rate of personal taxes ... If only there another group they could tax ... Like corporations... But no that's impossible...
Also share of the tax burden of the 10% riches in france in the same time period has reduced from over 50% to less than 50%
Do you have any studies or articles or anything or is your only answer endless austerity?
> Ultimately therefore, France will have to make painful adjustments to bring its debt maths back under control. Just like Italy, Spain (and, of course, Greece) did a decade ago, from which these southern European economies have emerged much stronger.
> The crucial question is how much political pain France must go through before it makes, or is forced to make, this adjustment.
I also agree with the article when it says the issue is not so much in that the math can’t be made to work, but in the political options at hand of which both look to kick the can down the road rather then tackling it. More years would mean time for the issue to compound, making it more costly to solve.
It’s really the political deadlock in France that’s concerning. The funding issues France faces are by no means insurmountable.
>It’s really the political deadlock in France that’s concerning. The funding issues France faces are by no means insurmountable.
This is the part that is so terrifying. The French financial situation is addressable, but the red-green alliance (socialists and Islamists) are united in causing as much violence and chaos as they can because that helps bring down Macron. On the other side, the right is fine with it too because it elevates Le Pen.
This is coming for the U.S. next. We have the same angry young people + elite institutions that support the red-green alliance and are itching for a revolution that brings down our government. The socialists want Marxism and expropriation of private property via "wealth taxes" and the like; the Islamists want a Sharia state and are happy to use Palestinian sympathies to get there.
I hate to say it, but once the writing is on the wall like this, the only rational defense is fascism. That is coming in the U.S. because, notwithstanding the power of the red-green alliance and certain Left institutions allied with them (NYT, ivy league universities, the professoriate, etc.), there are still hundreds of millions of Americans that are not going to sit idly while our cities burn down and our pockets are emptied for UBI schemes and new embassies to receive Hamas. The reaction to the revolution though, may be just as bad as the revolution itself. Dark times are coming.
You, uh, you know there are western nations that already have wealth taxes and are doing fine, right?
It is nowhere near as apocalyptic as the political right keeps fetishistically telling you it is - and most of the other issues people are upset about are also fairly readily addressed. The problem is Republicans have been blocking, repealing, or spending billions convincing people like yourself that they are completely nonviable.
As far as Islamists go - countering them is as simple as anticorruption laws and enshrining human rights into law that run contrary to Sharia. Strengthen separation of church and state laws. If you get really desperate you could do what some other nations have started to do and consider religious indoctrination a form of child abuse due to the psychological impact of religious trauma. Or... a hundred other fairly straight forward options that are only an issue if you hypocritically want to have a Christian theocracy while opposing an Islamic theocracy.
The real dilemma for Europe (and note that there are similar riots, though over different issues, in other European countries) is that decades of slow growth/low growth policies that arose as a result of EU regulations have led to a situation where there simply isn't enough tax money available to continue to fund generous welfare policies.
It's like that game of musical chairs: the music just stopped, everyone rushed for a chair--and the people left standing are now angry. And rightfully so.
But I personally cannot honestly see how Europe solves this problem. The reality is, you can tax rich companies--but you slow growth even further. You can tax the wealthy--but they're slippery like cats: they can just slip out the door to some other location. Or you can engage in regulatory reform which makes it easier for companies to hire and fire and for people to start new businesses--but that requires some very politically unpopular reform, such as making it easier to terminate employees and, to some extent, reducing or eliminating worker and consumer protections.
And none of these changes, even if they would work, will work overnight. Even corporate regulatory reform that creates a more ‘business-friendly' environment takes at least a decade to show real progress--while the damage such regulatory reforms cause to workers would be felt immediately.
I fear Europe is in a tail-spin, and I don't know what the outcome of all of this will be.
I think cutting pensions would be a big start, but nobody can actually do that because there are less younger voters than there are senior voters. It's democracy baby.
They’re currently doing that, both in Europe and in the USA. The current generation of elderly people is consuming multiple times in social benefits what they paid in. These outlays must be reigned in, or their children, and grandchildren will be the ones to suffer
It is absolutely true. I have been giving a lecture throughout 2026 detailing this problem specifically at top economics departments across the USA. The average Medicare beneficiary today is expected to receive 3.5X the amount in benefits compared to what they paid in (inflation adjusted). We are stealing the economic future of our children to continue propping this program up, and it’s despicable
First, you may not be including what the employer's paid on the employee's behalf. If so, problem solved, and that should be included as part of total compensation.
If not, I would question from whence your data came. The report from the Brookings Institute I refence above can be downloaded here and has the data.
Maybe this report is wrong. I'm not sure where they calculated their numbers and I haven't studied it. You seem like you have. Either way, I think we start means testing and I think we'll be ok.
I mean you can't suddenly start means testing a program that you promised people for their entire working lives, would not be more means tested, and was sold as a truly universal program. That completely fundamentally breaks trust in a government. Even reducing payments universally would be better than that.
From Page 7:
TABLE 3 Expected Present Value of Lifetime Social Security and Medicare Benefits and Taxes
Single male ($89,600 in 2020 dollars) turning 65 in 2010
SS Benefit Medicare Benefit Total SS Taxes Medicare Taxes Total
Younger generations are not requesting cutting pension either. They are, for the most part, actually supporting the fight for greater pensions, younger.
The French, both young and old, just want the president to invent wealth and distribute it generously. And if he can't, let's fire him and put in charge someone who can.
After learning about how hard it is to even get a permanent career in France as a young person, I'm surprised that that reform for making it easier to fire people isn't more popular. Every young person just constantly job hops every like 6 months hoping that the next one will be the last. Wtf is that system?
It's a complex subject but I think it's taboo because it would be primarily seen as a loss of labor rights (which France is VERY proud of), but we should also not forget that young people are leveraged to the tits with mortgages that don't account for that change.
>You can tax the wealthy--but they're slippery like cats: they can just slip out the door to some other location.
Most can't, and those who can already did. Take Bernard Arnault. He tried to "make it" in America because of the French socialist administration of 1981 (the one who created the wealth tax, later repealed by Macron). He came back after a few years and being scammed like a dumbass. On the contrary, Stephane Bancel CEO of Moderna who became a billionaire in the US will never come back to France, even if france would somehow evolve into a tax heaven.
In real life, any random skilled professional has much better chances of making it anywhere in the world than billionaires. Billionaires owe their absurd success to exceptional circumstances and very specific context. By definition, it cannot statistically be replicated elsewhere. Arnault is the textbook example of it to a comical point, the added value of his luxury trinkets is irremediably tied to France PR.
Not to mention that the wealthy get where they are by providing a supply to meet some demand and that supply can be met by literally anybody else.
I forget the name but one country lost a bunch of stupidly wealthy people and the consequence was that the wealth that normally flowed to them instead flowed to dozens of other organizations, effectively creating hundreds of new millionaires. None were as stupendous wealthy, but society was still having its needs met and was arguably healthier for it.
Plus you've got wealth flight laws that basically say if you're above a certain net worth half your shit is left at the border on the way out, figuratively speaking. You're free to leave but you're not allowed to casually extract value from the economy and then just ship it somewhere else.
That tends to happen when you bring in immigrants and then don't let them participate as full members of society. I don't know what other outcome they expected.
Also from the same article showing more educated African immigrants than European:
> One in three immigrants was able to find work within a year of arriving in France. Europeans were the most likely to enter the workforce quickly, with more than half employed within 12 months of arrival.
Yes. The total numbers of educated, qualified immigrants is up significantly, and significantly more immigrants are now coming from Africa than from Europe.
So for your argument that African immigrants have less education than European immigrants to work, the education levels should be in decline.
It's not just Europe, it's the entire democratic world and its not coincidental. It's always been about Democracy and collective ownership of the sovereign authority of the state, not taxes. People really don't connect history and geopolitics/power to economic systems, and look at all of this stuff in a vacuum of honest math about taxes and spending.
Because the workers / lower classes in Western countries are starting to question the status of the social contract and their financial situations. The pattern of control repeats throughout history; when the working class begins to challenge economic inequality, elites leverage right-wing populist movements to protect their interests. Amplifying nationalist rhetoric and cultural division, use of sabotage provocateurs, media spin, wealth fractures working-class solidarity and divert attention away from systemic financial grievances, effectively maintaining the economic status quo through harsher social controls, deregulation, and further privatization of the publics assets.
So why is this happening broadly across the entire West? All of that sounds like it would be isolated to specific countries and economies.
Because almost the entire Western world is slaved by its sovereign creditors.
We are intentionally mired in debt, and when a state is reliant on creditors to buy its debt and avoid economic collapse, the state’s foreign and domestic policies conform to the interests of international finance and geopolitics rather than the moral will of its citizenry or even the economic stability of the country.
This entire pipeline relies on central banks, and the reason why modern financial mercantilism is buckling is because of an intrinsic paradox rooted in Keynesian economics. In regards to central banks, if a currency is truly managed for domestic sovereign needs, it cannot be perfectly coordinated with a foreign nation's competing needs. The call for international coordination is an admission that national central planning of money creates global distortions that the planners cannot control and, eventually, those leveraged distortions catch up with and mathematically declare winners and losers among those wealthy nations. The loser then scrambles the "old way" of achieving the same end-goals, via war, pillage, domestic repression across all aspects of life. Central banks keep fighting the Mundell-Fleming model, but eventually these coordinating banks have to confront each other, and the consequences ripple across the world.
People get hung up on the image of physical ownership of the chattel slave, when the end goal is what people should focus on; the fundamental logic of slavery is the elite extraction of labor and resources from a lower class. When you own sovereign debt, structural coercion is the new modern debt bondage. Under chattel slavery, masters bore the cost of feeding and housing captives, whereas debt bondage functions as a highly efficient upgrade where workers are financialized through student loans, housing, medical debt, etc., forcing them to police themselves and work indefinitely just to service the interest. When the people want services to improve in a democratic state, the politicians shrug and say "we can't afford it".
You are left with a democracy that strictly prioritizes system preservation by funding debt servicing, police, and surveillance, over public welfare because state stability is tied to financial markets and social control. Interest payments to private creditors are treated as legally non-negotiable to prevent economic collapse, ensuring the financial class is paid first. The resulting inequality and declining public services, popular unrest naturally rises, prompting politicians to aggressively fund security and surveillance apparatuses to suppress people and guarantee order.
Financial class has a deadman's switch on the entire western world, so you get Epstein-pedos, 08' collapses, drug money laundering, industrial disasters, etc. without consequence outside of a token sacrifice.
Whenever the people of a country have had enough, the creditor-class resorts to scapegoats and amplifying tangible leverage over necessities: The domestic "Other", usually immigrants and minorities, the "Leach" like welfare and unions, and/or the "Enemy" as a means to gin up a war to purge/emotionally exhaust your angry and poor men abroad before they stand against you at home. Place pressure of basic necessities to render the public docile and obedient. Psychologically, perpetual economic panic triggers a state of learned helplessness. When people are trapped in a constant fight-or-flight response over whether they can afford groceries or heating, their cognitive bandwidth is entirely monopolized by immediate survival.
What everyone needs to remember is not to repeat history and point at history's favorite evergreen scapegoat that always gets wrapped up in financial conspiracy. Guilty parties often hide behind and are of the community,, but it is not the entire cohort; shield and protect that community so that it is harder for these people to hide behind it. Similarly, your grievance isn't with capitalism, its with finance; don't allow them to weaponize and bundle you with communist bullshit.
It's been going on for ~600 years, yet people are surprised when it dawns on them. Let alone that the US revolution was specifically in response to this dynamic around currency, banking, and corporatization, not all that bullshit about tea and taxes.
The old aristocracy did not vanish when the West democratized; it adapted, corporatized, and institutionalized. Feudal titles became trusts, offshore funds, and family offices. Modern wealth preservation strategies prioritize low-risk, compounding returns backed by state-enforced taxation, these families heavily populate the institutional creditor class. Quietly absorbing the working class's taxes through sovereign debt servicing, legalizing their own tax avoidance strategies, and maintaining the extraction of wealth while elected politicians take the public blame for crumbling public services.
There is one more thing that you did not mention. Cut pensions and in some countries like France, raise retirement age.
Europe is truly fucked in the sense that making it easier to fire people during the age of AI is going to be extremely extremely unpopular and frankly may not even less to growth as many companies are careful with hiring and assessing the situation.
Europe can be the test case, allowing the U.S. to watch from the outside and see exactly what not to do.
It’s been entertaining watching Reddit praising universal healthcare, free tuition, and generous pensions while completely ignoring its lack of technological innovation, as if these massive social programs can exist without a thriving, growth-driven economy.
It boils down to welfare costs. They may have to cut down on welfare If they don’t want the European Central Bank to intervene and enforce austerity measures
They can balance the budget in whatever way they prefer. It’s not for us to say.
What we can demand, instead, is for the French to get on it, choose a direction, stay the course, and get it solved.
If French voters fail to press balanced finances, it will increase poverty all over Europe even though the rest of Europe is entirely innocent when it comes to how France budgets.
>What we can demand, instead, is for the French to get on it, choose a direction, stay the course, and get it solved.
They won't. They were told all their lives that the State was there for them, they know nothing about economy, budget etc... because the State takes care of everything and do everything for them, they don't have to worry about it. Most of the French don't even know how the pension system works, when you ask them they they describe some kind of capitalization scheme made for them by the State and that their pension is just the money they gave before and the State giving it back with interests... which is somehow funny, because if you ask them what they think about capitalization they will probably say it's the worst thing in the world...
More than half of the population receive more money from the State than what they pay, and no one is ready to give up the part they have... this country will just implode before reducing anything in the budget, you want to change anything and everyone go to the streets and burn cars...
Even a wealth tax would struggle to pay for their pension scheme which has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world and pays more than the average worker earns.
Also, the last time France tried a wealth tax, the wealthy just left the country. France is part of the EU where people can move countries easily.
Honestly, they have to redo their pension scheme. Everyone else has to as well, but Frances is on another level. It completely unsustainable.
Though I'm not convinced the wealth tax removal (or any other tax cuts) has lead to any major improvement to their economy overall. Kinda looks like revenue replaced with debt and little meaningful benefit to be seen.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury."
I think the French are delusional, and I want to rant about this for a second.
You guys have this economy that is centered around consumption, which has outpaced what your country's productive base can sustain, and were fine with it for decades. Imo, this was enabled in the past by having access to zero-interest debt/cheap debt, along with having the Francafrique sphere in Africa, where you had central banks in the Sahel region store their FX reserves in the French Treasury, speak French, and allow France to gain access to the resources/commodities in the region, which made it very easy for French companies to process said resources in higher-value industries, provide services around them, and capture a larger share of the value generated further up the economic chain.
But since both of these things are disappearing and are harder to access (there is no cheap debt available anymore, and the Françafrique sphere is being dismantled), you have a nation that is accustomed to a standard of living that can no longer be maintained.
I don't understand why, with decades of money flowing in, the French government/people never tried to set up anything that would allow them to perform strongly domestically or an economic model that wasn't so dependent on the factors I mentioned earlier. Instead, they just assumed that people would give them money forever.
I think the French people should accept austerity and understand that for the French economy to be sustainable, people are going to have to give things up. It might be the elderly who will be forced to retire later and get smaller payments from the government, or the young should accept poor services and less development.
I also don't really understand the tax the rich/socialism angle that people talk about. Even if you taxed every billionaire and high-net-worth person in France and took all of their money, the money would get sucked into the black hole that is the French economy, and in less than a couple of years you would be protesting again, asking for more.
It's a structural issue, meaning that no matter how much money you throw at it, it will persist. France has near-zero GDP growth this year and has had weak growth for several years before, and it has a population that is increasingly elderly, with more people retiring with pensions that will need to be paid out by the government. They are bleeding money every year trying to support these people, and it's only going to get worse as the proportion of the population that is elderly continues to increase. Just accept high taxes and lower living standards and care for your elderly.
The world that enabled you to exist like this doesn't exist anymore. Accept it and move on. Maybe try and leave the country if you're young, or just accept lower living standards. France should still exist in 50 years; it might be stagnant and a bit dilapidated, but it's better than it not existing, right?
Someone gets it. It's social democracy reaching a breaking point by hampering growth, now the tab is coming due and there's not enough new growth to sustain itself. Something will have to give but french workers understandably are not willing to accept lower standards of living or cuts in social services. The tab will soon come due across most of western Europe as well. So far they seem to have no answer.
I think people might be willing to accept hardships if those hardships were distributed equally. Hardships only affecting the lower income classes will never be willingly accepted.
VAT is extremely unfair, since lower classes spend all their income in consumption goods. So even if they have a low tax rate, they end up contributing the most in % from their income.
Meanwhile, the flat tax is still at 31% no matter your income, and it's extremely easy to not pay much taxes if you know what to do (holdings, etc). Not even talking about the 100k€ donation per parent every 15 years, and basically you end up with the majority of the population getting poorer while the rich doubled their financial worth since the Covid.
Your tax the rich section argues against something nobody is proposing. The actual Zucman tax is a 2% annual levy on fortunes above €100m, affecting around 1,800 households. Estimates range from €5bn to €25bn a year. That's a recurring tax, not a one-off seizure that gets "used up", and even the low end is a meaningful share of the €54bn in savings the government is looking for in 2027.
Also the real case for the Zucman tax is fairness. The average French effective tax rate, counting all taxes and social contributions, is around 50%. For billionaires, the effective rate drops to about 26%, roughly half, because most of their income sits untaxed in holding companies. Nobody will accept austerity while that gap exists. Telling people to accept high taxes and austerity while ruling out taxing those most able to actually pay is completely unreasonable and unjust.
The point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't matter whether you tax the ultra-wealthy 2% a year, 10% a year, 20% a year, or even confiscate a huge amount of their wealth in one go. It doesn't solve France's structural fiscal problem.
France and many other European countries issued enormous amounts of debt during the 2010s when borrowing costs were extremely low in order to maintain the high-consumption economies that Europe is known for. That debt doesn't disappear or stay cheap forever. As it matures, it has to be refinanced at today's much higher rates. France's annual interest bill is already around €65bn and is expected to rise towards or beyond €100bn by the end of the decade.
So you can raise €25bn from a wealth tax now, and it would help with government savings, but several years from now a large part of that revenue will be absorbed by the increase in debt-service costs. Then what? Raise the wealth tax again? Billionaires don't have infinite money, they have a finite amount available to them.
And that's before dealing with demographics. Taxing billionaires doesn't create more workers or fewer pensioners. France is becoming increasingly old, meaning a smaller working population will have to finance pensions, healthcare, and other services for a growing retired population.
That is why it is a structural problem. You can tax wealthy people to get them to pay more, and they should pay more, but it doesn't solve the gap between what France needs to pay in order to function and what its economy can actually sustain. That gap keeps getting bigger each year.
You cannot permanently solve an expanding annual flow problem by repeatedly taxing a finite stock of private wealth. It just doesn't work.
Any saving, whether a tax or a spending cut, gets partly absorbed as cheap 2010s debt matures and gets refinanced at higher rates, so the "then what?" argument works both ways. It only shows that addressing the deficit will require several measures at once. And a 2% tax on fortunes that grow faster than 2% a year means that only a part of the return is being taxed. It is incorrect to picture this as depleting a finite stock.
The bigger misunderstanding is that France is not a poor country. It is a rich country with a poor / indebted state. Households hold around €15tr in net wealth, more than four times the public debt, and private wealth has grown far faster than national income since the 1970s, so taxing capital more like labour taps a base that has been expanding for decades.
It is true that the ageing demographics put a strain on public finances but this can be addressed by prudent and solidaristic policies too. For instance, the pension system can be made fairer and cheaper by compressing them at the top while preserving a decent floor. This can be done by lowering the ceiling on pensionable earnings and tapering replacement rates as income rises while guaranteeing a minimum pension at 85% of the net minimum wage. This would mean taxing high pensions at the same rate as wages, and basing retirement on years worked rather than age.
No single tax closes a 5% deficit, but neither does putting the whole burden on pensioners and the young and imposing permanent austerity. Britain tried a permanent austerity approach in the 19th century to reduce its debt. It took them a century to do so.
I don't think it's wrong to view fortunes as a depletable stock. A 2% wealth tax may be sustainable when returns are comfortably above 2%, but returns can fluctuate, and government policy can change when fiscal pressures increase. Wealth is not an immutable stock that automatically generates positive returns forever.
Part of the issue I have with the idea is what happens after the tax becomes established. Future governments can raise the rate, lower the threshold, broaden the tax base from the ultra-wealthy to people who are merely wealthy or doing well, or layer additional taxes on capital on top of it.
Something introduced as a narrowly targeted tax can therefore become much broader over time, while also creating stronger incentives for capital to move elsewhere. You could eventually end up with something that was originally intended to target the ultra-wealthy becoming another tax borne by a much wider section of society, while the people with the most mobile capital are also the best positioned to avoid it.
There is historical precedent for taxes expanding after their introduction. VAT in the UK, Social Security payroll taxes in the US, and France's former ISF wealth tax all changed substantially over time through higher rates, broader bases, or additional brackets. This obviously doesn't prove that a 2% wealth tax would inevitably follow the same path, but it is why I wouldn't treat 2% as a permanent ceiling. I could easily see a narrowly targeted tax gradually becoming something that affects a much broader section of the population.
There is also the issue of tax incidence. Just because a tax is legally imposed on wealthy people does not mean they necessarily bear the entire economic cost themselves. People with substantial capital, business ownership, or market power may be better positioned to shift some of that cost onto consumers, workers, tenants, or others with less bargaining power.
I realize this makes me sound pro-billionaire or pro-bourgeois, which I'm not. My broader point is that I don't think the answer to an economy built around excessive consumption, persistent deficits, and ever-increasing debt is simply finding another group to tax. At some point, the level of rampant consumption and public spending itself needs to be looked at, and some level of downsizing has to occur.
The pension reforms you suggest also make sense, but that doesn't solve the fact that the law won't pass due to the makeup of the country. French pensioners and older voters are the country's largest and most politically influential voting bloc, and they have little incentive to support reforms that reduce their own benefits.
Other groups also behave the same way: students want more education funding, teachers want higher pay, households want lower taxes, and pensioners want their benefits protected. You end up with a situation where nearly everyone agrees that the fiscal position has to improve, but each group would rather somebody else absorb the cost.
That is why I keep coming back to austerity and acceptance. I'm using the term broadly to mean fiscal consolidation through some combination of lower government spending and higher taxes.
You're not wrong that the wealth tax alone will not solve the problem. But your argument is also not in good faith. Yes: taxing billionaires at the same rate that the rest of France pays won't solve the problem completely. But implying that taxing billionaires at a fair rate is pointless because it won't 100% solve the problem is also a very morally questionable path to take.
Also you implied that reducing pensions and reducing education spending are equally reasonable options for France. France's pension system is out of control. Their education system is relatively underfunded. These two choices are not equally valid.
Not to mention that the elderly control nearly all of the wealth in France... if anyone needs to take a hit it's not the youth....
It’s easy to say this from a macro perspective, and a lot harder when you’re facing the brunt of it. I know little about economics, but I know that when faced with a shitty situation in a democracy you’re supposed to make noise about it. Even if austerity is the right call, when the austerity comes at the cost of people’s healthcare, education, and future, that’s too big a cost for many people.
The elderly only need the current system to outsurvive them. So long as there’s a majority who believe they can coast the rest of their life in the current system nothing will change.
The main problem is 45 year of politicians telling them it was possible, and some politicians today still say we can perfectly put back the retirement age at 60 without any problem, "we will tax xxx and that's it"...
>You guys have this economy that is centered around consumption, which has outpaced what your country's productive base can sustain, and were fine with it for decades.
This is true for all Werstern countries, though. The US more than any other - which is why the US is currently being dismantled by MAGA.
The US is not being "dismantled" by MAGA in any economic sense. You're looking at it purely from an international relations perspective which is subjective on its own.
The US GDP per capita is double that of France and and overall 2026 GDP growth is on track to be about three times France's in 2026. The only thing it has in common is a debt problem, which the US is far better positioned to deal with than France is.
The paragraph about taxing the rich is making a lot of assumptions. When the gov says we need to cut into public education and such to find 15 billions but offers 40 billions to Amazon and such in the same breath, there is legitimate criticism to be had.
I think the French government should make a referendum where people have to choose whether they want all these benefits while all taxes go up x% or no tax increase and then go with whichever of both people vote for.
The protestors do have valid grievances. France is spending too much on pensioners and corporate handouts.
5-6% of GDP just goes to corporate subsidies, a big chunk of that is a general social security contribution exemption on employer payrolls,
14-15% of GDP is going to general pensioners. But there is a hidden pensioner payment problem that has cropped up that is not included in the general pensioner numbers, *huge* amounts of sectoral budgets are going to Pensioners. 32% of France's National Education Ministry goes to Pensions. And 30% of France's Interior Ministry's budget is also now just Pension payouts.
This has created a "crowding out" effect where funds intended for active public services are diverted to historical retirement obligations.
And then of course there is healthcare, where 11 to 12% of GDP goes to healthcare, which overly is consumed (understandably) by the elderly. When you combine healthcare + pensioner spending, that is 40% of all public spending is now just absorbed by the elderly.
Put this in perspective: ages 50 to 79 hold 61% of the total gross wealth in France, despite making up just 50% of the households. You may say that this is normal: elderly people had more time to save and buy assets, except, in the past in France, household wealth typically peaked at age 55, and then assets were spent down. Public pensions have basically increased rather substantially compared to how much they used to pay (in inflation adjusted amounts) decades ago, and compounding matters is when the retirement age was lowered from 65 to 60. For decades after WWII, pensions were pegged to active worker salaries. Even though pensions are now indexed to inflation rather than wage growth, the initial calculation rates for the Baby Boomer generation were incredibly generous.
The cohort born in the 1950s and early 1960s retired under a mathematical formula that was highly favorable. In France, a retiree's net pension replacement rate averaged 74.4% of their last paycheck (which is 14 points above the OECD average, for comparison, Germany's is 52.9%). Because their initial calculation gave them roughly three-quarters of their final salary, their starting baseline was incredibly high. Future generations have had that door already closed statutorily, meanwhile the boomers are absorbing the maximum pension possible in real-terms compared to future generations while also sitting on the most assets that any Pensioner generation has had, ever.
Asking younger generations to face austerity, when they already have had so much of their public service budgets eaten alive to service Pensioners, but Pensioners are not being asked to face any real austerity or to pay any taxes on their assets or capital cash flows or (the property tax reform meant to make PT assessments fairer, has continued to be pushed back against, for example) the fact pensioners get special tax breaks. It comes off as just unfairly asymmetric; the young is being asked to sacrifice whereas the old, not so much. Lack of shared sacrifice flies in the face of the social contract just rubs the wrong the way. Hard for policies to survive that. Pensioners are going to have to face pain, the question is how much. The harder they try to prevent paying any real price, the riskier things become politically (unrest).
And yet the party participating to the current protest the most (LFI) campaigns on retirement at 60 and indexing all pensions on wages so wage growth will never catch up to the pension
The problem is people in France will not understand this. The sentiment is pensioners have earned what they get and additional money for other things is just a matter of the government deciding it's there. People in France in my experience have very little understanding or sense of responsibility for the state budget.
That is ultimately gonna only make things worse for populace. First armed forces will start with lethal rounds and if they fail to control then the anarchy will anyway make France a living hell. If the people want to create a failed state then so be it, they will serve as a warning to rest of the world.
That sentiment isn’t just France. Look at all of the people pushing to increase the income limit on payroll taxes in order to replenish the SS Trust Fund? Yet many of those same people want to cut benefits for future retirees.
It's not those pensioners' fault that the government was too generous in decades past. Everyone has to bear the burden because it's unfair to pin this solely on those who've been paying into the system for 40-50 years.
Of course its the boomer pensioners fault, with their votes they make sure nobody can touch the pensions. Just because they paid into the system when the ratio between pensioners and working age populations was more favorable doesn't mean they now get to suck the state budget dry and leave nothing for other generations.
The obvious solution is to take on more debt so the problem falls on future generations, who currently have no grievances because they haven't been born!
You're completely right but France also bad riots at any kind of pension/retirement reform too. They're aware it's a problem. They can't do anything about it. Those initial very generous pension reforms that happened like 40 years ago are really starting hurt them but it's so much easier to add benefits to people than to take them away
That’s every welfare state everywhere. If you don’t want to spend lots of public money on the elderly, don’t build a welfare state. Then by the time you’re elderly, you won’t have to worry about government spending.
Usually this happens, when a group has a tiny sliver of the pie, and someone tries to take that away. Not being able to articulate the structural drivers of why their pie is shrinking, does not invalid the defense of the pie.
A rich person buying a stock for 0.01 more causing every other owner of that stock to have their valuation increased doesn't take away anything out of your pie. You can't convert financial assets like bonds or stocks into food or housing. They are literally nothing, they have no physical form, it's just a legal construct.
You know what IS shrinking your pie? A bunch of old people that consume the same things you need/want, but do not produce anything in return.
Or simply... They want things to work ? Have decent classroom ? Teachers ? And we can't for the reasons you were given ?
People aren't (mostly) stupid. We all understand there is contraints. But when you live in a country missing 10% of its teachers while you're giving away 100+b a year without ANY engagement for companies ? And when said companies have given 60b dividend last quarter while firing ?
We have tax return program for companies called CIR (Research tax credit). Basically, as a private entity, you can declare a part of your work as "research".
But the definition is vague enough and the there is absolutely no control so, companies are declaring anything in it to maximize it.
Then, there is the infamous CICE. Same kind of bullshit. Lots of billions, no effect (multiple studies are saying so for each) and yet, the government won't budge on it.
I have no problem subsidizing private entities as long as it's controlled and aimed at developing key sectors. Here, we're simply throwing money away for nothing.
My French mother in law is a perfect example of this. She retired at 50 (special exemption as a preschool teacher). She is now 77. She has been retired for 27 years and has been retired for about the same amount as she has been working, possibly actually longer than she had been working. She is one of those toxic types who sucks out everyone’s life force and she is in excellent health and her own mother died at 98, so I’m pretty sure she’ll be around until her late 90’s. She owns three properties, two of which were likely purchased with her pension money.
The purpose of democracy is to establish legitimacy and authority. It is not to establish truth, to create balances, uphold principles.. or govern.
In 2015 Greece's populist government held a referendum on whether or not to accept the troika bailout terms. They voted no. Then the government of Greece had to accept the terms anyway.
The vore issue is the common conception of democracy as a "fight for rights."
In the minds of many comma politics is all about struggle for rights. The society struggles for pension rights, and school funding, and housing rights, h
ealthcare, etc. That is why/how those things come to be. Protests and other forms of struggle create them.
There is nowhere for issues like efficacy, tax balance or whatnot to even come into this conversation.
Does the Far Right even promise to slash the budget? I was under the impression they too were cowed and afraid to reform the welfare state just as much as the Left
They got conditioned to think that they just need to burn some buildings, loot some shops, maybe attack firefighters and then the government will just cave. That's absolutely not trivial.
I just watched a street interview with one of the Paris protesters: this is almost word for word exactly what they said needs to be done. The “government needs to fear the people”.
This has to do with the fact the people have very little say in what the government does. And the government is very centralized in the office of the President in Paris. If the policy of Paris is not what the people want, their only way to get heard is by protesting and striking. This is why protests and strikes are so common in France.
You are mixing protesters and rioters here. People want decent schools. Nothing crazy. Thery protest due to the cost of life, one could think that taxing the wealth and building more social apartments to decrease the renting costs is also an option.
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and building more social apartments to decrease the renting costs is also an option.
Build with what money? France is already has more social spending (by % of GDP) than USSR did, it has large primary deficit and due to already enormous tax burden, no room to raise taxes any further. So where that money is supposed to come from?
If you check a but deeper you will see that in lost of the cities there was peaceful protests from one side and looters on other places. Most of the people were behaving fine. Check in Italy, there were violence too. Same in Albania, it’s not only France. Still no one can excuse the looters and rioters actions but there are morons everywhere. Why did the police let that happen and mostly focused on the peaceful protesters is a good question.
There are a lot of taxes for the middle class, very less on the upper one, taxing inheritance over a certain amount could be done. Taxing the richest too but that’s not the way our government decided to go.
With which money? Well that’s the problem of bad decisions, getting money from the market to pay the pensions is idiot, getting some to invest in social programs like social apartments would be smarter.
France is a rich country despite its debt, the global amount that the boomers will leave to their kids is quite a lot, there will be some possibilities to recover from there in the coming years too.
>France is a rich country despite its debt, the global amount that the boomers will leave to their kids is quite a lot, there will be some possibilities to recover from there in the coming years too.
France is indeed quite rich, but not as rich as the protesters believe. It has been basically keeping up appearances for decades while maxing out one credit card after another. In the end, the choices are :
- drastically cut spending (hello more riots)
- raise taxes (they are at breaking point)
- grow economy until tax to gdp is less of a problem (that would require actually having strong growth)
- inflate it away (hello even more riots). Not sure if that one is even possible anyway since ECB controls euro
And no, I don't think praying that grandpa dies soon is a solution to French problems.
The French need to rebuild trust in political institutions and some type of referendum, or other similar means to rebuild that could be worth considering.
But this question sort of has been on the ballot already and the decision has been split. The French voters are split and polarised.
Also, in reality, balancing a budget with only tax hikes or cutting benefits is a very difficult task. Asking what option people want of two not very feasible options might ultimately decrease trust as either promise is difficult to keep.
But I do think the French have to re find trust in each other, come around the same table and find a deal where everyone shares the hurt so equally that the deal can have political legitimacy. It’s not easy to achieve, but it’s necessary because France is past half measures.
"All taxes go up x%" shows a misunderstanding of the protester position. Their position is "select taxes go up x%". Which ones that is depends on who you ask, but it may be corporate, wealth, income for the rich, whatever.
You want to call such a targeted tax irresponsible or inefectual or outright dangerous, then go ahead, that's a fine opinion to have, but don't confuse that the protesters are asking for.
That's the thing they are ok for taxes to go up if you ask them. Just for the richs or corps. But nowadays Richs and corps can pack up and move to the next country.
Capital flight is a myth. They can't move land, they can't move factories and you can tax those things all the same when the owner leaves along with a chunk of their wealth
It literally already happened in France. They already had wealth tax. It lead to lower tax revenue. So they cancelled it and then tax revenue went back up.
The issue is that we are now collecting less through taxes than before, we have a gap of 2 percentage points of GDP that we’re not collecting any longer (€60bn) since Macron was elected. And we’re actively pouring state funds into mega corps that just up their dividend. Everyone would be ok with raising taxes for the upper 20% if it meant better redistribution
France is already collecting 45% of GDP in taxes. Already one of the highest in the world. There comes a point where more taxes won’t really solve anything because the people paying the top brackets are the people that have the most mobility. E.g. Why would a highly specialized skilled worker choose to pay massive taxes when they could just move to Switzerland, or Germany and have roughly the same standard of living with comparatively much lower tax burden? And that’s before we even talk about billionaires who generally have even fewer roots in the community.
Which particular taxes shall go up? All or only the income tax / vat which are easy(er) to enforce, but impact lower income people disproportionately more? Why not even discussing to raise taxes on the rich, like a wide wealth tax or increased property tax?
The topics is that simple. Plus (a significant portion of) people are stupid and easy to manipulate.
He said this is one of those moments where someone will think that any time a government does something, it's called socialism. You do not know what socialism is.
I'm surrounded by people who grew up in a socialist country every day, yet they're no more knowledgeable than anyone else about it. In fact, due to the socialist government being a foreign occupier and the bias inherent from that, they're probably a lot less correct a lot more of the time than anyone else.
What made you think being born somewhere stops you from being mistaken about that somewhere?
Fact I am not "mistaken" and did seen that myself?
Fact I literally had course "scientific communism" is school there?
Fact that I know quite a bit of modern economy science?
Or fact that I also been yang and stupid like those idiots many years ago and know exactly what they (and you) think? 😄
As if someone worth $1M is all that rich? With constant high inflation $1M is no longer all that much. In most OECD countries $1M would be insufficient to retire on, assuming no other retirement income. Not to mention that most of that wealth is in real estate, which does not bring all that much of income.
That limit is somewhere around 5% of the stock every year or 50% of the flow, considering the wealth of very high net worth individuals expands at a rate higher than 7%
The idea that you can tax 5% of someone's wealth every year just because their assets happened to grow by 7% is a pretty crude calculation.
Asset appreciation is not the same thing as cash income, and there is no guarantee that wealth will grow by 7% every single year.
Even with simple arithmetic, a 5% annual wealth tax on assets earning 7% is equivalent to taking about 71% of the annual return. And that is before accounting for any existing taxes.
A tax burden that high could seriously discourage investment and capital accumulation. Once you also consider tax incidence, some of that burden could ultimately fall on workers as well.
There is a limit to how much you can raise from working people too, yet they are the only ones with 50% of their income going to taxes.
If a person making 50k a year can fund 25k of public services, a person owning 1 billion should be perfectly able to fund 500m of public services, as they are already doing by investing in bonds
As for the "how", there are many economists who have their recipes, give them a try, without exempting stocks this time.
You are conflating annual income, which is a flow, with accumulated wealth, which is a stock.
You can tax people by forcing them to draw down their assets, but that does not make it a permanent source of revenue. Simply transferring ownership of capital does not create additional goods or resources.
Buying government bonds is also completely different from paying taxes. A bond purchase is an exchange of assets. Taxation is a transfer to the government without receiving an equivalent financial asset in return.
There is also the issue of tax incidence. Taxes on capital can ultimately affect workers through lower investment, reduced capital accumulation, or capital flight.
In practice, even the Nordic welfare states are not financed simply by taxing the wealth of the rich. They rely on broad tax bases that include substantial taxation of the middle class as well.
There's no point arguing with him, they always think there is another pot of gold at the end of some rainbow that they can tax, the fact is no one in their right mind would invest or hire in France. Luxuries, perfume and wine and airbus are the only high moat exports they have, everything else they do is subject to ruthless global market competition and it's clear they can't compete well enough to grow. So when a bond crises forces the government into arrears on salaries and expenses, they will be forced by economic reality to change. Until then, they won't do a thing.
>You are conflating annual income, which is a flow, with accumulated wealth, which is a stock.
[...]
Buying government bonds is also completely different from paying taxes. A bond purchase is an exchange of assets. Taxation is a transfer to the government without receiving an equivalent financial asset in return.
Sorry if I gave you that impression, but I am indeed saying that many billionaires do have quite a bit of their money as bonds to governments, so our governments are already operating with money "taken" from billionaires, demonstrating that we do need that money to operate.
The arrangement changes, ofc, but governments are using billionaires' money already.
> Simply transferring ownership of capital does not create additional goods or resources.
Except it does because the owners of an asset will decide what to do with it. Right now big owners invest in AI, spaceships, Israeli tech and luxury real estate. If capital was instead in the hands of welfare cooperatives, you'd see more social housing, which in turn would allow workers to join productive companies in city centers at lower costs, which would generate more goods.
>Taxes on capital can ultimately affect workers through lower investment, reduced capital accumulation, or capital flight.
That is true for all taxes. Taxes on income will force working people to drastically reduce their spending, slowing down the real economy. However, money in the hands of working people is more likely to be spent in goods and services, while money in the hands of rich asset owners simply buys more assets, rising homes prices too.
>In practice, even the Nordic welfare states are not financed simply by taxing the wealth of the rich. They rely on broad tax bases that include substantial taxation of the middle class as well.
The Nordic welfare state is also possible because they did not sell away their assets. Norway has ownership of their oil production, creating a national sovreign fund. Many cities in Sweden, like the one I lived in, have housing companies under public control that build and do research for the people rather than maximizing profits, this way rents are very low.
First of all, government bonds are not primarily held by wealthy individuals. Major holders include central banks, financial institutions, pension funds, and foreign investors.
And buying government bonds is completely different from paying taxes. Buying a bond means lending money to the government. The government has an obligation to repay the principal and interest, so bond financing cannot simply be treated as another form of taxing the wealthy.
The same issue applies to redistribution of capital. Simply transferring ownership does not create any new goods or services. There is also no guarantee that public investment will allocate capital more efficiently than private investment. It can just as easily result in inefficient allocation of resources.
Housing is another example. The key issue seems to be land use regulation rather than whether capital is publicly or privately owned.
Tokyo has continued to add large amounts of privately built housing as its population has grown, under a relatively flexible zoning system. Paris, by contrast, has much tighter building regulations and height restrictions that constrain housing supply. There is no reason housing
Taxing people on the stock of wealth already exists, at least in France. We call it property taxes, and it has never been a reason for people to sell their homes en masse.
3.5% ? dollar millionaires? God that super reach man! If you own good apartment in Paris center you are already "dollar millionaire".
God help us with idiots of all kind.
Go to a Cuba - take a look. Maj be it is not too late to go to Venezuela too. See how good is it when you "make reach people help"
Get some education man, that really helps.
I did told you - get some education, helps in life. It is not a joke.
It is not a "neoliberalism" that idiotism 😄
Sure you going to define who is "rich" and how much that "bit" should be. And in short time you destroy all business there and leaders of that movement took what left by the name of the people and start to manage it - by the name of the people - and everybody would be worse off but they will be better then others and so happy and try to put their children on their place.
That happen so many times - not funny anymore. Yeah, I do believe education level there really get down 😄
France needs to stop eating itself. Just like the USA does at the moment. For example we shoudl Havel et the trump tax cuts expire. Some of the wealth taxes crazies want in the USA would be massively damaging and have the opposite effect unless we are only targeting above $10B
It's not an income problem but a spending problem. Taxing those 3,5% of millionaires won't solve any issue, at best it will delay the inevitable and at worst they leave and France is poorer than it already is
Haha sell their wealth, they'll take it with them, including the jobs that it generates.
I wish france and the left in general good luck with that mentality, they'll need it. It will be worse than Greece. All that just because the French cannot accept that there are too many people relying on benefits and the pension age is too low.
Jobs are "generated" by people having needs or wills and purchasing power. You are free to be a private tutor, but only if there are kids needing private tutors and parents with enough money to pay for that.
Wealth itself only generates jobs if the owner thinks they can gain more than what they spend. So only if there is demand of something and purchasing power behind it.
I'm not going to argue with you about the fundamentals of economics. The French will experience soon enough what it means to have no wealth, and finally "be equal".
We used to have a wealth tax. In fact there is still one on real estate. It brought a few billion euros, while pushing people to leave the country as soon as they started getting succesful, or even before that, as soon as they got their diploma...
Good luck extracting much money annually out of someone with a million or two in assets, potentially a fair proportion tied up in primary residence and business or farm.
I’m not opposed to wealth taxes at all, but people really overestimate how much they’ll get from and under-estimate the complexity of not just causing lots of forced sales.
It doesn't matter which taxes go up. If you want to keep living with the same government handouts you need to pay more money. You won't get enough just from the rich to fund your spending
The thing is “the rich” only represents a very small population, probably less than 10k people in the country. They are also those who can leave the country, or change their investment spending oversea rather than domestically easily.
Besides that, taxing them also doesn’t really make much different. Increase 2% on everyone will likely to have much more better effect than Increase 10% tax on the richest 10k. Of course we can do both.
61k households in the highest tax bracket (181k taxable income to get there) 420k in the next bracket (160k for a married couple to get there)
While 22 million household make so little money they are not paying income tax.
Framing a general increase as a fairer way to carry the burden is absurd. And I’m saying that while being in the 3rd highest tax bracket, which puts me in the 10%, if my taxes would go to education, health, social programs I’d be glad to pay more. However it seems our government is hell bent on emptying the coffers to pad the big corps bottom line.
And this doesn’t even address the issue of inherited capital
Having more tax brackets with an agressive top end would provide better compliance and result in more collection. We only have 5 and someone making 200k a year is taxed the same as someone making 20 million. You could lower the bottom end tax rate and yet collect more as a whole
Property represents a very small net wealth of the “rich”. Besides that it is non-productive asset. Everyone needs more productive asset. Regardless which country it is, all government needs “companies” that can produce sustainable income & jobs.
Also, Taxing the current wealthiest 10k-100k people aren’t really that hard. The hard part is after that, the next potential wealthiest 100k person will not willing to create their wealth in that particular country anymore just to reduce their risk. That’s the headache part. Each country is also fighting with each other to entice these wealthy people/talented individual to move their tax domicile.
french actually know where the spending increased this last decade and would be ok to reduce it.
It's just that the government and online propaganda wants to cut everything in our system except the par that inflated out of control
France has some of the highest spending per student in the world. The education system does not have a lack of funding. The real issue is the pension system in France and it will be painful to actually address it. The retirees drawing the pension are making more money than people working. The pensions make up around 25% of education spending alone.
The young are demanding to increase spending just as much.
This is stance across the entire political spectrum and all ages. The only ones in opposition are Macron and his center party and you can see where this gets them on the polls.
France is fundamentally fucked and will need a Greece style wake up call.
Not all the demands are about spending more. You could also frame them as calls to cut spending fairly. Many raise the point that cuts target young people more than they target pensioners.
It’s a fair point to raise.
France needs to find a political option with legitimacy. It means the pain needs to fall fairly within society. Cuts that impact everyone and tax hikes are worth considering too so that everyone really participates. It’s not a dealbreaker that the tax rate is already high—you can still increase it, the French are entitled to do so, and they should if it unlocks a political option that works. E.g. it’s better to have a higher tax rate than to default (adding this context for the people reading the comment that react strongly when tax hikes are mentioned).
I don't like the framing of someone else's money. It is a rhetorical tool to oppose taxes and redistribution. There is, however, a deeper point: the trade off between spending now and investing in the future. The more that is spent on programs for the elderly the less there is to spend on other programs. The less that is spent on debt servicing now means more needs to be spent on debt later.
I don’t understand the hate for this analogy. It’s a much simpler way to explain govt finances to the general public and the analogy functions in most of the regular scenarios that aren’t exceptional emergencies.
Sure a household cannot devalue its currency to inflate away the debt, nor can it unilaterally default, or dramatically increase their incomes through aggressive increases in taxation, but if you’re considering any of those its already a deep crisis. Personally I find that for explaining day to day financing of the government, and especially the need to balance the deficit, the analogy is adequate.
What about the checkbook framing do you find so objectionable?
Right but that’s literally pedantic in the overwhelming majority of cases. Sure, the government controls its own currency, but can you find any meaningful way for a country to use that to lower their debt burden without doing catastrophic and lasting damage to themselves?
I can’t. I’ve mentioned a couple of the tools countries have with regards to currency and each and every one of those tools come with long term pain that no reasonable politician (who cares about his country’s future) would ever implement.
Every government has literally been issuing more currency for decades. So unless you think everything since the Nixon Shock has been catastrophic and lasting damage, it's unclear what you mean.
And the other difference is simple - most households don't control their own production. They have income that comes from wages. Few governments get wages from outside sources, they have internal production.
Aside from what you already mentioned, planning for a country starts with the assumption of perpetual economic productivity and government planners start with all of the assets a country needs to run (because the country already exists, this must generally be true).
A person starts with no assets, takes on debt to rapidly accumulate them, expects to stop earning in the future, and so plans for those debts to be paid off before retirement.
At a certain point it make no sense for a household to invest in its future productivity because the remaining years of economic production are too few whereas a government must continually invest in future productivity because it will continuously need its citizens to be able to generate incomes.
The scale of the agents and the feedback loops are also completely different. A household's impact on the economy it sits within is essentially negligible; if it spends less in the economy, the negative consequences of that will almost certainly not be felt by the household. If a government spends less, the wider economy will notice the lower aggregate demand and it will directly result in lower tax receipts (and possibly increased welfare spending).
A government must act in the interests of a wide range of other competing actors (assuming a democracy), where any individual household is expected to act almost exclusively its own interests.
A government can make policy to encourage or discourage other actors to carry out the aims of the government's economic policy - a household cannot.
They are so fundamentally different that it's hard to see why people try to draw a comparison.
Excellent observations. I think one thing that a lot of people mistake is that there can be similarities between different categories of things without them having to “basically be the same“. Obviously there will be some similarities between how a household and the government can think about revenue and spending (and let’s also not forget the oft mentioned mythical business that government supposedly should run more like). And to be honest, if people could separate these things, I don’t think it would be so much of a problem. But I think a lot of people basically expect them to be interchangeable. That is to say that, since both a horse and chair have four legs and are sat upon, they must be the same thing and therefore should act the same. Ultimately, we leave a lot on the table when governments are constrained by the concepts they must be the same as households or businesses.
Because a government raising taxes, cutting programs, or issuing debt is not the same as balancing a checkbook. Governments have fiscal and monetary policy; households do not.
For a household, when there is an economic downturn, it is relatively easy to cut discretionary spending. The same is not true for a government. In fact, governments should consider increasing spending to stimulate the economy. When a household has a surplus, it can spend more on luxury items. A government needs to be concerned with the inflationary effect of spending in a hot economy. Households generally have fixed earnings and cannot easily generate more revenue. Governments can pass legislation to increase tax revenue or they can properly fund the IRS and net 12-14x every dollar spent. Due to budget cuts, it is estimated the US is losing out on $861 billion in revenue over the next decade.
In general, I find the analogy reductive. If balancing the budget were easy, then we should be running net neutral or a surplus every year. By comparing it to a checkbook it makes it appear that cutting spending is the only way to go and that government revenues are fixed.
If my household had access to nearly unlimited, cheap debt. I would go on a massive asset buying spree. I'd be stupid not to. That maximises my revenue which can be used to pay off debt easily. If I acquired so many assets it was problematic economically, I'd pivot to investing in productive infrastructure and the wider economy to grow more.
But people comparing govt finances to households, seem to also advocate doing the exact opposite. They tend to advocate the firesale of assets and slashes revenue streams.
In my country we had a govt come in preaching fiscal responsibility. Their first point of business was borrowing debt to fund tax cuts.
Have you ever looked at a household budget and said "Fuck, I'm in too much debt, better reduce my income quick!"
The big costs most governments face is pension spending and elder care, which are not productive assets. The issue I have with Keynsiaj rhetoric is it tends to ignore how governments are actually spending the money.
For France especially, their gdp has barely grown despite massive spending. In their case, the household analogy holds up well.
The tax cuts did not cause the current situation. It was brewing long before those were applied. France is already taxing its population at world record approaching rates while outspending China and the Soviet Union on welfare programs as a percentage of GDP.
What's the plan here? Keep increasing taxes and pensions until France becomes the first country in history to spend 100% of GDP on social services? And then what, try to conquer other countries to get more money for spending?
The only way out is to cut spending. You can't outrun wasteful and absurd amounts of spending by increasing your taxes perpetually.
Why not both ? I mean, we had 10 years of government proactively reducing its source of income but there are today easy fix that could provide a starting point, yet they touch on large corporations and retirees, so this will never happen.
Example: not aligning pension on inflation: +7/8bn on the budget, end of the tax deduction for retirees: +5bn. Half of this could already resolve most of the issues in the public education system without any impact on domestic consumption.
There were riots when France tried to modestly raise the retirement age, seems like they just want everything to be "better" without making an actual changes
The deficit is 17 billion (5%). So yes, smth like that, with 5 year moratorium on indexing pensions on inflations, would go miles towards solving the issues
As an American, I’m watching what’s happening in France/ Europe with schadenfreude.
Growing up in the 2000s/early 2010s, I heard Europeans constantly criticize the USA as a racist, overly capitalistic, warmongering nation that should just focus on the welfare state instead. When it was (correctly) pointed out Europe could only sustain these massive welfare states because of the geopolitical backing of the USA, and that such disinterest in competing in the global economy/geopolitics would come back to haunt them, Europeans clutched their pearls and insulted you as misinformed.
Fast forward 15 years, Europe is imploding. It’s imploding because it turns out the generous welfare state is the only thing that it had going for itself. It can’t compete economically, militarily, or technologically with the great powers of our time. USA doesn’t want to pay for another European war. China is out competing EU industries. Both are out competing EU on AI. All the European talent and wealth leaves. You’re left with a bunch of aging adults that need to be taken care of, and a society too poor and socially defeated to address the challenges it is facing.
I hope your high taxes and welfare at the expense of a military and good economy were worth it. Looks like the gravy train is crashing to a halt.
✌🏻
Edit: Reddit, you can’t downvote your way out of facing reality.
I’m French and American (and have a top 1-2% income) the situation in the US compared to France isn’t better for 80% of the population (except if you think maybe they having bigger cars and driving more on highways with more lanes makes one happier).
All the industries (including the one I work in) that are globally competitive in the United States benefit a small silver of the US population (and a lot of them only exists because of immigration that the current admin is hell bent on killing), the rest of the economy is and has always been thinly veiled protectionism masquerading as capitalism.
The 7 biggest Big tech companies that are third of sp500 by now are only employing ~1m employees and supporting tens of millions of retirees that’ll go bankrupt if those companies’ stock go down because they won’t be able to sustain their spending.
Also, France has nuclear weapons, no military threads threats there.
You just proved OPs point though. The situation being considered “better for 80% of the population” in France is fueled by a completely unsustainable welfare state. It is drying up, while the US keeps growing. What happens 10 years down the line when France has no money for social services, can’t take on debt, taxes keep dwindling, and it takes down the Euro?
Think the “80% of the population” will still be better as unemployment increases, benefits are cut, and the Euro tumbles? All while France drowns itself in legislation and red tape so growth cannot happen and the economy continues to decline.
The United States is running a 6% budget deficit, more than France, and has generally a culture that is completely foreign to being financially responsible. What do you think happens in 10 years when China rises and the US looses the dollar privilege all while its flagship companies are not competitive anymore because they were sustained by immigration which has dried up? Not even going to mention AI which is going to rip through jobs that have a 32-35% federal income tax marginal rate and starve the federal government.
Folks in middle America are going to get hit hard when they’re one paycheck away from loosing everything because their costs are way too high because they had to have a F-150, a 2000sqft/200sqm house that costs a fortune to heat and requires AC and a 25 mile commute to go to their underperforming company where they are paid too much money.
This discussion is about France, yet you keep trying to apply whataboutisms to the US.
But sure. The US also controls its currency, and has had about 140% real GDP growth in the last 20 years while France has had 22%. So the US has grown 7x as much as France.
The US in the last 20 years went from an economy that was ~6x as large as France to one that is now 10x as large.
Maybe not for France. But for the rest of Europe there absolutely is a threat. Realistically I don't believe that France would nuke Russia if it invaded the baltics or finland.
What would a better military have done exactly for Europe? Their deficits would be far worse even and the economic collapse would happen even sooner. It’s not like Russia has any ability to actually go to war with Germany or France or whatv regardless and that’s Europe’s only major physical threat. Btw you’re gloating but Americas debt and deficit picture is not all that much better, it’s made worse by our massive defense spending too and our excursions abroad. All that money and we can’t even really win against Iran and run out of ammo in weeks.
Our welfare spending is massive too btw we just spend it extremely inefficiently where a ton of people don’t even get basic medical access despite the massive sums of tax money sucked up. The us spends far more tax money on healthcare per capita than any other nation , despite having shitty health outcomes and a huge uninsured unserved population like its some third world country.
Our ass is mostly only saved for now because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, that’s literally the only reason. The Us is a terrible example for responsible spending lol , just in the last few years the deficit has increased massively, and every president has been far worse than the last. Trumps big beautiful bill has really blown up the budget with its tax cuts on the rich, which was already struggling with all the Covid money printing under Trump 1 and Biden.
They’d be able to stand up to Russia without worrying what the USA was doing.
Just because Russia doesn’t have the ability to directly wage war against France or Germany doesn’t mean an invasion of Eastern Europe would be something they could ignore.
If Russia occupies Ukraine, they would have an additional 30 million people and directly border Poland. At that time, it will feel much more painful and you will feel a more direct threat.
If they do not like those 30million will be jumping in line for conscription, shit they are already facing a demographic crisis and if the war end poorly military age men will be in short supply in both Ukraine and Russia. Not to mention theres a chance it will just be endless guerilla warfare. Shit by the time any real recovery of the Russian military to fight a combined Europe putins gonna be in his mid to late 80s.
If your population is growing steadily, you will always be more economically and militarily powerful in the future. That makes going to war now less attractive as it comes at the cost of future growth.
If your population is declining, you will never be stronger than now. As such, war now is better than war later.
Because you’re paying for it with other peoples sacrifices, effort, and money. And as you can see, it’s coming to an end. What’s your plan when you can’t keep borrowing your way out of paying for everything? You’re still in denial.
You are totally right with your point, but even then people keep hammering the "capitalist america bad" trope while people keep jumping the ship. Some people just cant help themselves.
It is so sad to watch this all unfolding as a european (dutch), seeing basically the EU implode on itself because of ever rising bureacracies and governments. Seeing stupid foreign policy, stupid internal policy and other retarded laws just breaking the countries apart is so frustrating.
I agree with your point about the borrowing as well. It is going to cause hyperinflation in the euro
You should check the finances of your country. Last years have been a clownshow with Trump trying to save USA's way of life with unconstitutional tariffs, complaining about bonds and Fed rates because the gov deficits needs cheap money to continue. The USA has resources, high tech, the dollar and the best military, but thanks god because it's struggling for a decade or more. Low life expectancy, high inequality, low PTO, huge debt, low median wealth, compared to other rich countries, it's only a good country if you're talented or born wealthy.
It is really rich coming from someone who has the likes of Trump, Thiel, Karp and Musk controlling their country. Starting pointless wars like in Iran, which you can't even win. Your country is speedrunning fascism and betting on building your AI god for which you don't even have the electrical grid to support it.
The bubble is starting to pop, Pax Americana is over. Without global trade and at least semi-competent leadership that doesn't tariff other countries based on the mood their baby president woke up with the USA will be nothing in 10 years.
Try to enjoy your last moments of being on the top buddy. Best case scenario you guys will get someone sane to save whatever there still is to save of your country.
This is the logical issue for all social spending. I would like the USA to start a pension fund. Instead of paying it as a Ponzi scheme off current workers, instead take the tax and place in an account invested in the S&P500 index until 55, then 60/40 index and bonds until you retire. At retirement (after 59.5), the state buys the best annuity they can for you. This forces retirement savings and prevents poor investment strategies. It also means there aren’t any promises. You earn it, it’s invested the best we know how, and then you get the best annuity available for your cash. You can’t screw up your retirement, but it’s not based on current workers or taxation.
The issue is the government makes promises, and takes on all the risk. But it’s paid for by current workers. As this continues, the public begin voting more and more overly generous benefits for themselves, while leaving the bill for the future people to pay.
The issue with that, and 401Ks is that it ties everyone's retirement to the stock market. That means elected officials are motivated to make the line go up, regardless of whether that makes sense in the economic climate or is good for the country. It's why we have had almost 20 yrs of quantative easing and super low interest rates. Corporate consolidation should mean economies of scale, and higher profits, and the line going up, so the government allows it.
I'm my opinion, tying retirement to the stock market is one of the driving factors that has led us to this moment, where a bunch of billionaires are looting the US government, and supporting far right movements around the world, to loot those governments.
The problem is that social security is already running at pay as you go. Your system would be better than what we have, but we got to pay for the system we have for another 50-70 years even if we switched now.
Maybe public spending(especially lavish pensions) should be redirected from the old to young and working age people...? After all why paong taxes if majority of the benefit go to old people who are already asset rich and spent like crazy decades ago?
These protests in France only make things harder for them. Rampage and riot even more. I wish Melanchon the best of luck in becoming president. No matter how much you rampage and destroy, you will only end up suffering more.
Genuinely what is the path here? 1. Means testing pensions = riots, 2. Raising retirement age = riots, 3. Printing money = can't, only ECB can authorize. At least the US has the petrodollar, 4. Taxing wealthy = Ok, but is it enough to cover it all? Is there diminishing returns with capital flight? Wasn't ISF repealed for this reason?
With the structural gridlock that exists in that country, we're just waiting for their borrowing costs to blow up. But even then, what's the rescue plan? The ESM? How's that going to work for the 2nd largest shareholder turning from contributor to borrower? Credit rating for ESM will blow up, too. And there's not enough in there to save France so other countries like Germany will get capital called. Seems like there's 0 good outcome.
Protesters demand an end to Macron's ten years of tax cuts to the rich so that the money gifted to them can be returned to the institutions from which it was taken.
We should not see poverty at highest level in decades and hunger on the rise in a global north country.
In the meantime, the wealth of our billionaires has doubled in the past 10 years.
Our demands are legitimate. The money is already there.
You didn't answer the guys remark, which was valid. France is spending more than you are earning. The country of course has great potential, but if you cannot make difficult choices like not retiring at 62, then markets stop believing you will repay debts.
I'm in Scandinavia and have no problem defending that you have welfare state. But burning cars isn't going to fix your deficit. And compared to other European countries there are plenty of low hanging fruits to get there.
Lovely fact but the US' inefficient healthcare system has no relevance here. If anything, it proves my point. If a country is outspending every single other OECD member on social programs and has some of the highest tax rates in the world, the required action is to reduce spending and re-examine how much money is going where, not increase it. This applies both to the US healthcare system and France' overall social spending.
> Unlike all the Russian bots that have been learning about economics in recent weeks.
Maybe you should join them in learning about economics because you clearly haven't grasped the basics yet. Blaming everything on Russian bots when people don't support your blatantly nonsensical statements is very on par with what we are seeing in France right now. Keep blaming others and avoiding the consequences of your own actions and vote. When the policies you supported as a population go massively wrong, the reasonable action is to question your original beliefs and take responsibility. Not to burn down the city and blame others. That's how democracy works. You get the freedom do decide at the cost of being responsible for the results. By not doing so, you are running either directly into an eventual collapse or into the waiting arms of extremists. Either one leading to the degradation of the democratic system.
Just one more welfare project, bro. Just one more tax increase, bro. This time, it will surely fix your problems. First country to reach 100% of GDP spent on social programs, lets go!
We make way more money in the US. My wife and I are two random musicians you’ve never heard of and we make enough to be in the top 1% of household income in France.
The wealth of billionaires is pennies compared to the scale of France’s debt issues. You could tax them out of existence, keep the budget going for a few months, then you’re back in the same issue (except with no billionaires, I guess)
What? Even if all money was expropriated from the ultra wealthy in France, it wouldn’t nearly end their debt, nor would it stop the structural problem they have of unsustainable spending.
Protesters want to have enough money to eat and live decent lives. Bankruptcy and fascism are things people don't think or care about when they're hungry and see no future for themselves as the social contract is visibly weakening over time.
Don't blame them, blame Macron for creating the material conditions in the population that led to this. As MLK said, riots are the language of the unheard, and the government is too busy salting the wounds to try and engage a dialogue.
Macron is the one leading the country to bankruptcy, he's been in charge of our finances for 10 years and has mismanaged them beyond belief, the protesters have nothing to do with that.
Refusing to address people's material conditions issues is what's leading the country to fascism, surely you should be able to understand that after seeing Trump using the "price of eggs" bullshit to turn the tide and get reelected.
I mean opening the borders up to a large amount of people who have no money, jobs, or skills will greatly increase inequality unless you are just handing bags of money out at the border.
Lets skip BS. Nobody hungry there, we both know that perfectly well. They all eat and 3 times a day mostly 😄
Macron is best centrists president France has for years. He is centrists, not ultra left not ultra right. French people simply work less then anybody in Europe - do you understand that?
From the state itself, 16% french people have to sacrifice meals due to food insecurity, and the number is on the rise. This is not normal in a developed country.
Macron is a "centrist" who only has right wing ministers in his government, and votes laws with the far right. How convenient is that.
Yeah, I know. In US like 14%, sure. I been myself in that %, you know? That program of agriculture department to help farmers. I told you - lets skip BS. That bored.
This whole just raise taxes on the wealthy argument is so juvenile and stupid tbh. I see this shit in California with the billionaires tax. The issues are out of control spending, lack of accountability/auditing of spent funds, and borderline corruption with how contracts are handed out etc.
Why should we trust our incompetent leaders to fix problems by giving them more money to waste through raising taxes? It won’t solve shit.
The demand is not to raise taxes on the wealthy, it's to restore the wealth taxes removed by Macron and get rid of the tax credits he created for the wealthy.
Two things can be done at once. Wanting to fix the deeper running issues isn't prevented by not wanting to become an oligarchic country. The demonstrations are only related to the second part.
You make it sounds like those tax reforms had no benefits to the French economy at all and that reverting them would simply bring 62 billion a year as revenue without any negative consequences.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but thinking that restoring the pre-2018 taxes gives 62 billion a year without downsides is a little naive.
I was actually looking into this last night and I will say that the tax cuts on the wealthy have not really had a positive effect yet if one was theorized to happen. Tax exile slowed, but honestly at a small rate. Private investment due to the tax cuts have not meaningfully increased in relation to the tax cuts, and wages haven't meaningfully raised after the reforms as well. The one thing that has increased though is dividend payouts to shareholders.
I'm for dunking on France for having stupid tax systems, but after 8 years of tax cuts, one should look at the data and realize that the recent tax cuts haven't provided the benefits that were originally argued for.
In theory that makes sense. In practice, I'm uncertain.
Macron got in 2017, total tax take then was €365B. Total tax take in 2024 was €370B (that's as far forward as the OECD data goes).
Cumulative inflation over that time was ~18%. So in 2017 terms, the 2024 revenue was ~€303B, 16.9% down.
French GDP growth was ~8% over that period. Doesn't look like much of that is following on into tax revenues at all.
Frances deficit in 2024 was €170B. So the tax cuts are wholely funded by debt. As that grows, so do the costs of servicing it and the opportunity costs mount.
By this point, the cuts to taxes will amount to hundreds of billions of euros. All accruing interest annually.
Which leads up to my point:
>Capital flight happened, diminishing growth. Not to mention the headache of the administrative costs.
When will the removal of this supposed net tax deficiency start returning benefits to the state in the form of increased tax returns? How many decades is it expected to take to pay the costs?
Because right now the answer appears to pretty obvious:
It never will.
For this to pay off France would need to become Europe's most productive and fastest growing economy for at least a couple decades with absolutely monstrous growth.
France as one the world highest tax pressure. The issue that we spend money irresponsibly and waste a lot of the hard earned money from the citizen.
Instead asking for more, we should be protesting for less.
Less waste, less taxes, less pensions, less social benefits, less international help, less state spending, less spending for EU..
Protesters demand targeted spending and the markets require fiscal restraint on the total budget. There is no reason why both can't be met in full or partly at the same time.
Even if the far left wins the presidency next year and attempts to nationalise the economy, without a balanced budget, the bond markets will put a stop to it. Everything runs on debt costs and the bond markets are the king. And the left knows this.
I mean even Trump's futile attempt at Iran spooked the bond markets from THE economy of the world. The French is just an easy picking, with no sovereign currency and extraordinary debt. The bonds will force the French to restrain its pension and welfare state.
Either welfare, debt management or balanced budget. Only two out of three options are available at any time.
The markets don't demand fiscal restraint, they demand fiscal responsibility. Meaning restraint... or, hear me out, increased taxes. You can improve public services without blasting the bond market if you would just for gods sake raise taxes to a level that is able to sustain (or expand) public services.
Shit costs money, and when you have a giant population of retired pensioners and increasingly smaller generations proceeding them, this creates a problem.
You guys are being silly on purpose. CORPORATE taxes before 1986 was like 50% and now they are half of that. Seems like the government gave up that income to pay for social programs for ultimately no good reason
Yes. Taxes are on profit and right now the great majority of that money goes to shareholders and stock buy backs not actually investing in the company itself: https://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/banques-finance/industrie-financiere/actionnaires-le-cac-40-a-distribue-98-milliards-d-euros-en-2024-1015599.html
Almost 100 billion euros to shareholders 2024 ... I'm sure the French people would have use for that money instead
Your beliefs are predicated on myths and propaganda to separate you and from your own money and accept a reduction in your quality of life.
Why do I have to show anything? You go ahead and try to show that low tax rates work. The US has incredibly low taxes and their society is practically crumbling. In Europe, austerity and restraint has governed since the 80s where the decline began. Keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different results....
Boy howdy it would be, like, so crazy if somehow we had a historical precedent for tax and spend policy. Like, if there were a whole economic suite of policies named after one guy which spurred 3% economic growth for 40 years in the U.S.A... Like, wouldn't that be sooooo crazy?
Which taxes do you want to raise specifically, how much do you expect to make with these raised taxes, and to what extent is that going to cover the exploding demand for public services in France’s rapidly aging society?
Macron cut a lot of wealth taxes when he entered office.
It’s why it was hilarious seeing ‘left wing’ Americans laude him for so long when he’s despised by the left in France and Europe for being in the pocket of the rich.
They also spend tons of money on corporate subsidies and they are well known for that in Europe despite it being against EU rules which pisses off other EU nations.
They generated basically nothing; the reason they were abolished was that the revenue generated was minimal and the macroeconomic effects were overall negative.
The problem is that France already has incredibly high tax rates across the board by European standards. France has run out of runway and is quickly approaching a sovereign debt crisis. Which in an economy the size of France will not be pretty for France (or the rest of Europe, including us across the channel)
This why I can’t take anyone seriously when they think just raising taxes on the rich will solve the problem. France is already known for high taxes, if anything high taxes is what caused slow growth for the country which ultimately lead to less tax revenue as time went on.
Just raising taxes is such a short term idea. You might get more revenue for a year or two but from there your tax revenues start to stagnate or even dip.
Corporate tax was around 33%, and was lowered to 25. Wealth tax has been cut out completely. And the government wonders why there's no money ... So yeah, you could just go back to the previous tax rates, and there would be money.
Oh, those tax cut were made to push employment, which they didn't.
You know what raised instead ? Dividends. So yes, we could raise taxes.
Its somewhere in the neighborhood of an increase of about 40 billion, which aint a ton. Idk what the answer is but I can tell you its jot more neoliberalism in the form of austerity and belt tightening for the working class. If it was Macron would be mor popular as thats what France has been doing for the last 30 years. I would also implore you to look at the west and tell me exactly where tax cuts for the rich amd deregulation is making peoples lives meaningfully better
I am not advocating for any of that though. It's just that a one time capture of 40 billion euros does... Absolutely nothing.. it's so disconcerting that that is the most the average voter is capable of thinking of.
Les marcje fin1nciers ils reclament mais va va pour eux ils gagnent bien leur vie depuis macron jai vu que lecornu et letat etait inquiet de proteger 2 ou 3 boutiques de luxes dans paris moi je suis plus ecoeure pour la fleuriste ou le petit bar du coin
Genuine question: could French leaders meaningfully reduce the burden of existing pensioners even if they wanted to? In the US, states are legally obligated to fulfill existing debts as promised and cannot declare bankruptcy - their only choice is to cut benefits for younger, new government employees (which many states have already done) and wait for retirees to die off. So here at least it's a long slow journey to a balanced budget where pension obligations no longer weigh as heavily as they do now. Not sure if France is in the same boat or it's just a matter of political will to rip the band aid off.
Today, In “Capitalism is Broke,” we take a look at a sticky set of deep, historical contradictions in France that have become very ripe indeed and which offer a preview of what’s coming to your country.
all the fiscal restraint fuckers are rich. Coincidence much? If you can afford all the inflation then it doesnt bother you. Heck, you might even call for austerity. Fuck austerity policy that only benefits the rich.
Maybe, just maybe, instead of looting the poor shops on the streets, the rioters should loot the billionaire homes? Expecting the government tax the rich? Why not just do it yourselves? Rob a bank, don't rob the convenience store! They aren't gonna be able stop everyone!
Expecting the authorities to do something has been the bane of European existence. Stop expecting, act now and loot from the right people. Just like Robinhood!
This sub shows the absolute bankruptcy of modern economics: the automatic answer is always more austerity, never cutting military spending, the building of new aircraft carriers.. Bringing back the ISF is always out of the question.
The French were promised that tax cuts and privatization would usher in utopia. It surprisingly didn't, so now the pendulum has swung back. Voting in Macron was stupid, doing it twice even worse.
This is happening everywhere. You don't have demonstrations in the US because you've been conditioned to a fuck you got mine mentality. As inequality soars it will only get worse. Redistribution is needed.
When are we gonna understand that macroeconomics work entirely different to microeconomics.
Whenever people say that these states need to get their finances under control, they are arguing from a microeconomics perspective, because it sounds intuitive and is what neoliberalism has been arguing for decades.
But States don't need to run a budget surplus, in fact there can be no growth without somebody taking up debts. Whenever there is a surplus, there is a deficit on the other side.
The state sector in countries like France NEED to make deficits, otherwise the economy will slow down or stop altogether. The only reason, that countries like Germany can afford to have a budget surplus (they did for a few years during Schäuble Era) is because they have an export surplus. But aside from that happening at the expense of countries like France or Italy, literally not every country can run an export surplus or just become more competitive, these are relative concepts. Some can be, but not everybody.
So France literally has no choice other than to make more debt and there is nothing wrong with that. As long as it makes debts in Euro, where they have (partly) souverignity of the currency.
It can, as long as the European central bank issues, the institution which is controlled by the member states. You are implying that "printing money" is equivalent to inflation which is not the case.
As long as a country is running a deficit within its own currency and can always service any debt, as it is the issuer of the currency and does not need bond investors or anyone else's capital.
The fact that we use the bonds system, is a political choice, as it is assumed in neoliberal theory that private investors always manage capital better than the state. But like I mentioned, it is only a political choice, not a nature law. You can see this, that Greece only went close to bankruptcy when the ECB refused to buy more Greek bonds, whereas during COVID, during which Greece had even higher debt to GDP ratio, Greece didn't have any issue getting money because it was covered by the ECB.
It sounds like you are talking about a trade deficit, which is not the issue here. France has a budget deficit fueled by increasingly expensive debt. This is not required at all.
What I was trying to explain, is that within a closed economy, one of the four sectors needs to run a deficit for the others to be able to have a surplus.
The private sector always runs a surplus, as people save up money for bad times, the business sector has stopped running deficit and saves as well. In France's case, they have a trade deficit so the foreign sector is also running a surplus, literally the only sector remaining is the state one. And that's actually an advantage because it is the issuer of its own currency and thus can't run out of money, or at least has more control over it.
It's a fundamental failure of the EU and mainstream macro. Sectoral balances are given little to no attention. Everyone is supposed to pursue export led growth and/or attract as much FDI as possible. It's a fallacy of composition and makes all these sovereign fiscal 'crises' unsolvable within the mainstream framework.
Not until we relearn that governments earn what they spend, rather than spending what the earn like the rest of us, will anything truly be solved.
I nominate this post for dumbest statement of 2026.
Here's a quick correction on some of your incorrect statements:
1. "in fact there can be no growth without somebody taking up debts."
False. I don't even know how to disprove such a ridiculous statement. Organizations constantly increase their productivity and net profits in ways that don't require external lending. Real growth is literally a measurement of growth excluding debt growth. Your statement is literally so false that we have basic economic terms that describe the opposite process occurring.
2. The state sector in countries like France NEED to make deficits, otherwise the economy will slow down or stop altogether.
Again blatantly false. See Bill Clinton era USA as exemplary proof (a budget surplus- and a trade deficit- yet very consistent real growth). Economic growth is predominantly driven by technological innovation. Spending less govt funds may slow this process but certainly does not stop it.
3. "France literally has no choice other than to make more debt and there is nothing wrong with that."
Again a completely ridiculous claim. France has many choices. They could balance the budget via austerity and lower real growth rates. They could increase taxes in order to balance the budget (many countries did just this during WW2). They could also begin to inflate the debt away (France and Germany did this after WW2). Pretending that France has no options is completely disproven by history.
Or you could - I know completely wild idea - tax the superrich?
Sorrysorry I know, people with hundreds of millions have worked very hard for all of their assets, it's only my personal inadequacy and jealousy that's behind these outrageous suggestions
You could simply take all the shares of the companies the top 0.01% own and transfer it to the government. And it still wouldn't make a dent in the French deficit. The reality is the French have gotten addicted to spending gratuitously on social security, and they're running out of the limit on their credit card. The cost of French debt is now higher than Greece.
This is coming at a time when France wants to divert it's military supply chain away from the US and increase their capability without the US, which will cost billions. There are some hard choices to be made, and some even harder ones to be made if Europe truly wants to invest in its autonomy.
david1610 | 8 hours ago
I literally had an argument the other day about triple locked pensions, and we have something similar to the UK in Australia, but here the aged pension is more a safety net than a retirement plan, since most people will self fund in future. Anyway the triple locked pensions are insane, I fully support pensions being indexed to wages, however indexing it to the larger of the two is disgustingly unfair to younger people, where necessarily pensions will continue to grow as a burden mathematically against incomes.
Now France just indexes to CPI from what I can see, but the overall entitled thought process of older people is similar and insane. You can't have it all you can't have extremely high house prices, infinite money and care workers coming to your house without expecting some push back from the people paying for all this.
Melodic-Ebb-7781 | 7 hours ago
Triple lock is so incredibly stupid i can't fathom how someone could ever think it's a good idea. It's setup to be a cancer that only grows until it kills its host nation.
0o0o0o0o0o0z | 6 hours ago
> Triple lock is so incredibly stupid i can't fathom how someone could ever think it's a good idea. It's setup to be a cancer that only grows until it kills its host nation.
It's not a good idea; it's that generation voting to get "theirs" and not giving a fuck about anyone else.
_Gobulcoque | 6 hours ago
> Triple lock is so incredibly stupid i can't fathom how someone could ever think it's a good idea.
For the UK, at the time it was introduced, it was a good idea. Growth was never predicted to be stagnant, and we had some of the worst pensioner poverty of a developed country.
But since it's introduction, we've had stagflation effectively, aging population, revolution in how industries and employment works, and unforeseeable issues in health and care (no genuinely).;
Triple lock at it's introduction was a good idea, but long overdue a change.
Leoryon | 4 hours ago
Well I am curious as a non British person: did the triple lock already included when it was introduced a sunset clause, or a forced revision clause?
Something like « after 20 years of triple lock the triple lock expires, or require to be voted again, or the index goes to best of the three to average of the three… ». Not an automatic kick the can mechanism…
Because if it was not included when it was introduced it was not a good idea. Such legislation when you can easily see the damaging effect in 20 years at a need a stop gap to truly be a good idea.
_Gobulcoque | 4 hours ago
> Well I am curious as a non British person: did the triple lock already included when it was introduced a sunset clause, or a forced revision clause?
I honestly don't know, but usually our laws do not have those kind of clauses unless the law was created for some specific timebound issue (COVID). They just become issues for successive governments to deal with and reform.
Xandara2 | 3 hours ago
Anyone who thinks growth will continue forever should be taken out back. The resulting lack of brain activity would probably improve the average intelligence.
SnooOpinions8790 | an hour ago
We could have far more growth but we have over-regulated everything and given everyone an effective veto on everything with judicial reviews etc that can drag pretty much anything you want to do out until its not worth doing any more.
Definitely feels more like rule of lawyers than rule of law. Everything is now Jarndyce vs Jarndyce so we have shrinking industry, shrinking growth etc. Bleak House was supposed to be a warning not a blueprint for a whole society
We don't need infinite growth but the current enforced stagnation is a choice
_Gobulcoque | 3 hours ago
> Anyone who thinks growth will continue forever should be taken out back
This comes to mind...
No return to boom and bust; said many ways by Gordon Brown, 2008.
apialess | 2 hours ago
I was a child in the 90s and remember news report about pensioners in extreme poverty, literally starving/freezing to death. And they were genuinely the WW2 generation - there was a lot of public support for treating them better, as well as (arguably) a moral imperative. As you say, it's the 30 years since that have made it so irrational, but so hard for a party that wants to win an election to change. The outrage about just means testing the winter fuel allowance was ridiculous.
Dapper_Bus5069 | an hour ago
They perfectly knew it was a bad idea, they just did it in order to win the election, and now you can't touch it because no one will vote for you...
HumorAccomplished611 | 4 hours ago
Yea you should pay more upfront then. That way the risk mitigation is just you paying more.
GruePwnr | 2 hours ago
The US did this for social security and it worked perfectly well. Now if SS runs out of money, the only generation that loses is the baby boomers.
Worth-Jicama3936 | 6 hours ago
In France, the average pensioner has a higher income than the average worker. Not is better off because of saved wealth. INCOME. That’s truly insane and the entire country riots anytime anyone tries to fix anything. I honestly don’t see this getting better before it gets way, way worse.
Dapper_Bus5069 | 58 minutes ago
My grandmother is 89 and has almost 3000€/month (2000 from hers, + 1000 from half of my deceased grandfather's pension, because yes, ex-public servant has this), and she retired at 55.
It's good for her but this is just crazy when you think about it just 2 seconds
Klutzy-Notice-8247 | 18 minutes ago
She’s actually been collecting it for as long as she worked.
thehourglasses | 6 minutes ago
Is it crazier than a factory worker getting paid .025% of a finished product’s sales price?
Ihavetoleavesoon | 6 hours ago
ELI5 triple lock please.
_Gobulcoque | 6 hours ago
Pensions rise by inflation, wage growth, or 2.5% - whichever is highest.
The idea was to get more pensioners out of poverty inline with a growing economy.
It wasn't necessarily a stupid policy. A growing economy would have wages rising faster than inflation, inflation rising because wages were rising (thus taxation rising in either case), or 2.5% if neither.
In reality, inflation rose because of COVID and war, and wages are being held back because of (effectively) corporate greed, taxation traps (frozen personal allowance in the UK, £100k trap, etc.), and taxation loopholes (offshoring companies.)
Every policy idea has issues, and these are the issues of the triple lock.
Vaphell | 2 hours ago
> It wasn't necessarily a stupid policy.
it was, as it was predicated on pie in the sky bullshit, where nothing ever goes wrong.
Every few years you have either an economic slump, an inflation spike without a matching wage growth for a myriad of reasons.
This policy makes it almost guaranteed that in a downturn pensions actually get ahead compared to the productive parts of the economy, who fund them in the first place. Times are good = move in lockstep, times are bad = get ahead. Not to mention the pensions are one of major things strangling the economy in an aging society and affecting the very indicators that control them, so it's a self-reinforcing loop in practice.
michahell | 6 hours ago
or please provide a good reference, please!
eddiecai64 | 6 hours ago
A quick google search showed me this BBC article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq6m03ld7nvo
krostybat | 2 hours ago
France is now ruled by old people who don’t care one bit about the next 20 years.
Look at the age pyramid.
I tell my colleagues every day : don’t rush, there will be no retirement for us, work smart and be very conservative with your health and strength.
Working until you are 75 or 80 will be our future (if the world is still livable by this time).
The_Real_BenFranklin | 49 minutes ago
I mean you don’t see these youths fighting to lower pension payments either - they want more benefits and lower retirement ages.
Dizzy_Shake1722 | an hour ago
Or how about you raise the corporate tax rate back up to 50%
GurProfessional9534 | 12 hours ago
“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” - James Carville
Maybe you can intimidate politician into compliance, but nobody cows the long-duration bond market. Not when it is activated, at least. Sure, you can control it while it’s passive, but that is not the case now. It has the final say, over everyone, period.
ADP10 | 12 hours ago
And that’s why it doesn’t matter what these populists promise, the market will force their hand.
New_Breadfruit8692 | 11 hours ago
As we are now seeing with Trump's disastrous attacks on the US fiscal situation. We were promised he would slash at least a trillion if not two from spending when he allowed Musk to run amok through the government stealing data and firing non MAGA "excess" employees rendering services like the VA far less able to complete their missions. All the while not reducing spending but vastly increasing it, and adding illegal tariffs to the cost of living which was later reimbursed to corporations who kept it and the new price structure when it was consumers that paid the goddamned taxes in the first place. Then he deteriorated the economic outlook even further by starting an idiotic unwinnable war with Iran that not only nearly doubled fuel prices but is actively breaking the energy supply chains.
The results. I refied my house at 5.6% in April and now the average mortgage rate at closing is an average APR of 7.57 so just another way we get to pay for his demented incompetence. And by the way, I honestly believe it is not demented incompetence but fulfilling orders from his boss in Moscow.
jannycideforever | 7 hours ago
That's not necessarily true. There is always the path of Argentina.
Prosperity is always a political choice. Right now, it seems that most leaders of developed democracies are going to side with pensioners and special interest lobbies over the requirements for prosperity, even knowing the crisis that it will cause.
ADP10 | 7 hours ago
They can’t print like Argentina can. They are beholden to the bond market like everyone else in the eu. If prosperity was a choice, everyone would be prosperous…
jannycideforever | 7 hours ago
Prosperity is always a choice. It just has tradeoffs that people are often unwilling to accept. For example, if France wants to become a prosperous country it can't be a highly regulated economy that funnels 40% of GDP to give boomers pensions that are higher than the income of the average worker.
France is unwilling to accept this compromise so they have and will continue to choose to not be a prosperous country.
gimpwiz | 7 hours ago
Not drinking is a choice but alcoholics still exist, right? Nothing stops France from once again taking their spot on the world stage as the envy of most if not all except for their own decisions on how they want their country to work, and the relationships between people, government, business, work, and spending.
23rdCenturySouth | 7 hours ago
> the market will force their hand
The market isn't some force of nature. It's a collective decision-making mechanism that largely remains stable by being decentralized.
For four decades, we have worked tirelessly to centralize it.
It's not the invincible, universal structure it once was, it is increasingly a golden tower under siege.
Jealous_Bowler3093 | 7 hours ago
Great, and where do you plan to get the money to fund all this spending if the bond markets collapse?
ADP10 | 7 hours ago
It’s not even that deep.
Correct_Special2215 | 11 hours ago
La Grèce l’a appris par la méthode forte. La France, c’est l’élève juste derrière. On verra si la leçon sera bien comprise
hippydipster | 8 hours ago
Intimidating everyone isn't as great as it's made out to be.
a_library_socialist | 11 hours ago
It does - until the populace decides to take more extreme measures. France has some history with machines to do that . . . .
MakeMoneyNotWar | 10 hours ago
The reason Britain won the Napoleonic wars was because of its bond market. Napoleon couldn’t borrow due to France’s lack of creditworthiness, so had to rely on appropriation, especially from conquered territories. That worked when he was winning, but once he started losing…
Yst | 8 hours ago
He also tried to win that broader war of conquest by cutting off trade ties. Which also worked out very, very poorly, as historians have generally seen it.
The Continental System's mercantilist premises (tolerant of export but intolerant of import) proved flawed. It damaged domestic industrial sectors reliant on import/export. And strategically, it alienated (or even made enemies of) allies.
Now, as for the United States, the present administration did not invent the phenomenon of the US trying to dictate who its closest allies trade with. But with this chaotic overreaching, it may have managed to substantially destroy its capacity to do so in the near future, by overreaching so far that its allies are forced to simply ignore American threats and seek expansion of alternative trade ties elsewhere (just as the Continental System promoted the expansion of British trade in the Caribbean and Americas).
Kdave21 | 10 hours ago
I have noticed both the average Redditor and the average Twitter user wildly underestimate the power of having good credit as a nation. Destabilizing the way you obtain easy credit is one of the most stupid mistakes any country can make. The ability to borrow money is quite literally everything.
I think it's a shame that really no country has been able to "pay down the debt", and it seems every country has become addicted to social spending. I wonder where Canada might be if they had privatized social security in the 2000's, but it seems too late now for anyone
devliegende | 9 hours ago
Paying down the debt would be nonsensical. What's the point of having good credit if you're not borrowing.
ConsistentTip3932 | 9 hours ago
You pay down the debt in good times so you can borrow in bad times and stimulate the economy.
If you never pay down your debt the debt balloons to unmanageable levels and you have interest payments greater that take up a huge chunk of your budget. See Greece circa 2008 or USA right now
devliegende | 2 hours ago
There is no need to pay it down ever. All you need is for new debt to be equal or less than nominal economic growth and for markets to believe that this could be maintained into the future. The USA for example, assuming 2% inflation and 2% real GDP growth may easily run deficits of $1-1.2T indefinitely without problems.
The main problem for France now is, and for Greece 15 years ago was slow growth and the fact that they do not issue their own currency.
gimpwiz | 7 hours ago
The point of paying down debt is to have better credit.
And it doesn't have to be a literal reduction in total debt to zero. Rather few people even propose that. Rather, slowing debt growth so that it lags GDP growth will reduce total effective debt load and make people more willing to lend.
Cap spending, tax, and reduce effective debt during boom years. Borrow during bad years. It's a fine sounding strategy that has been proposed by people smarter than me.
devliegende | an hour ago
Debt growing slower than the economy is a fine idea. Litterally paying it down is not necessary and would be pretty stupid.
fdar_giltch | 2 hours ago
> I have noticed both the average Redditor and the average Twitter user wildly...
misunderstand economics of any kind
[OP] laxnut90 | 9 hours ago
The bond market would get even worse if instability increases.
Then the government would have less borrowing power than before.
The bond market eventually forces everyone's hands and the longer you ignore it, the worse it gets.
bronzinorns | 10 hours ago
You don't seem to understand how bond markets work
You can't really threaten people into lending you money
TheRadishBros | 10 hours ago
Even that would only rattle the bond market further. There’s no escaping economic reality.
jokikinen | 9 hours ago
And what would happen then? Bond markets add further % to rates. The French fight each other over the resources that are diminishing faster than before resulting in the unraveling of order, and destruction of welfare. Until at some point, some politician finds a way to stabilise society at a level of welfare that’s likely a lot lower than it was before. At some point after stabilisation, France will want new debt and at that point they have to show finances that make it sensible for money to be lent to them. It would be a lot easier to skip the societal upheaval and go directly towards solutions as it would cause less strife and result in less compromise.
I’ve seen a lot of French hint that the French will start some sort of a revolution as a vague threat against its allies meant to motivate them to pay France’s excess bills. If it comes to that, it’s the French that would lose the most. And for what? Because the French don’t want to make small compromises with other French? The situation is still entirely in the hands of the French. Rates are not yet too high and things could be sorted if the French work together to solve them.
That some French really think the next step should be some sort of intervention so that they don’t need to make slightly uncomfortable decisions shows a total lack of humility and that attitude, if it persists, would result in a course of action that’s worse for the French in every metric. It’s better for the French to decide by themselves—not let some other institution like the IMF decide. This speculation over a self-inflicted martyrdom equates too closely with how teens engage with troubles they face.
a_library_socialist | 9 hours ago
You should probably zoom out, and realize that you're claiming that France has a net negative production here.
> so that they don’t need to make slightly uncomfortable decisions
I mean, the protesters have been very plain that what they want is France to roll back the recent tax cut for the wealthy. Somehow that is unthinkable, while austerity is just "slightly uncomfortable"?
[OP] laxnut90 | 8 hours ago
Even rolling back the tax cuts would not be enough to save France at their current spending levels.
The bond market ultimately forces everyone's hands and the longer you ignore it the worse it gets.
Valuable-Sugar-9193 | 9 hours ago
That is not how bonds work. Suppose a revolutionary government takes over. The new government says French government bonds now pay 2%, whereas the previous market rate was 6%. Well, people can simply don’t buy the French government bonds at 2%.
Now, this new government could force people to buy French government bonds at 2%. Well, France would cease to be a liberal state where people have rights 🤷♀️
devliegende | 9 hours ago
That turned out pretty bad for the French people though
OrangeJr36 | 8 hours ago
Eh, the rights and systems the revolution brought were so popular that not even the Restoration was dumb enough to reverse them. Repeated protests during the Restoration caused them to reinstate a bunch more as time went on.
All in all, despite the problems that came with it, the revolution was absolutely a positive for 90% of the population. The nobility, ethnic minorities and victims of vigilante justice were the main sufferers.
a_library_socialist | 7 hours ago
> ethnic minorities
It's amazing how much the popular narrative of the French Revolution ignores this, as it was probably the reason for most of the deaths even in the Reign of Terror. It wasn't primarily the mob run crazy - it was just as much Paris putting control onto the rest of the country, down to language.
devliegende | an hour ago
It was pretty bad for the millions that died in the 25 years of nonstop wars that followed.
And all they got for all that was to get the king back. Two more revolutions, an empire and more wars followed before they achieved democray after 1870. Compare those 80 years with Britain who achieve democracy around the same time with much less instability and bloodshed.
My reading of history is that the revolution was a disaster for the people who lived it as well as their children and their grandchildren. Not to mention for the rest of Europe. The Dutch for example had a prosperous republic for over 200 years already and the end result of the French revolution was them getting a king. Napoleon also abolished a bunch of prosperous German and Italian republics and triggered the nationalism that ended up as an even bigger disaster for all of Europe 150 years later.
UnknownBreadd | 11 hours ago
Markets are not fundamental and all operate under a sovereign licence. Laws/rules create the market structures and dictate market power. Change the laws relating to the market, and you change the nature of the market itself
According_to_Mission | 11 hours ago
You can’t force lenders to give you money at a low premium if instead you’re very risky. And you can’t print infinite money without causing inflation. Even if you write a law banning inflation lol.
DefenestrationPraha | 10 hours ago
All the really important markets are of international character, and France, with its total economy size of 2-3 percent of the global GDP, cannot really "dictate" anything on the global scene. They can't even dictate production of their own currency, as the ECB is in Frankfurt and will not obey.
Demiu | 9 hours ago
Laws of supply and demand are fundamental
us1549 | 11 hours ago
You can't alter the free market with laws and rules.
Supply and demand will always win out
Edit: if France passes any laws to reduce its liability for bonds already issued, do you think future bondholders will continue to lend to France? If yes, it will be a significantly higher interest rates
a_library_socialist | 10 hours ago
The existence of private property itself requires laws and rules.
The fact that the resources tied to bonds are owned by bond holders is only due to law, not any natural thing.
DefenestrationPraha | 10 hours ago
And? Again, France is currently addicted to borrowing and if it cannot live within its own means, it will have to adjust its laws to whatever French creditors can tolerate.
No nation that goes on a debt spree is truly sovereign.
zb0t1 | 10 hours ago
I'm 12 and this is deep material right here.
Any econ and pol sci first year drop out would spot the nonsense in your comment and yet you decided to damage the information space with it.
jokikinen | 10 hours ago
That’s like saying you can build guns to make war less scary, but it’s still far off winning a war, and going into war with guns is still scary.
Dizzy_Shake1722 | 7 hours ago
You're right if only france could raise more revenue perhaps pay down its debt? Maybe that would help stabilize their bond market... If only there was some way.....
Too bad restoring the corporate tax rate to 50% like it was before 1986 is simply impossible and every politician who even mentions it turns into dust like avengers endgame whenever they utter the words "corporate tax hike" or rather "une hausse de l’impôt sur les sociétés."
gimpwiz | 7 hours ago
Ah yes, the main problem in French governance is inadequate taxes.
Dizzy_Shake1722 | 6 hours ago
Ah yes, you seem to be commenting on the relatively high rate of personal taxes ... If only there another group they could tax ... Like corporations... But no that's impossible...
Also share of the tax burden of the 10% riches in france in the same time period has reduced from over 50% to less than 50%
Do you have any studies or articles or anything or is your only answer endless austerity?
jokikinen | 8 hours ago
> Ultimately therefore, France will have to make painful adjustments to bring its debt maths back under control. Just like Italy, Spain (and, of course, Greece) did a decade ago, from which these southern European economies have emerged much stronger.
> The crucial question is how much political pain France must go through before it makes, or is forced to make, this adjustment.
I also agree with the article when it says the issue is not so much in that the math can’t be made to work, but in the political options at hand of which both look to kick the can down the road rather then tackling it. More years would mean time for the issue to compound, making it more costly to solve.
It’s really the political deadlock in France that’s concerning. The funding issues France faces are by no means insurmountable.
crake | 7 hours ago
>It’s really the political deadlock in France that’s concerning. The funding issues France faces are by no means insurmountable.
This is the part that is so terrifying. The French financial situation is addressable, but the red-green alliance (socialists and Islamists) are united in causing as much violence and chaos as they can because that helps bring down Macron. On the other side, the right is fine with it too because it elevates Le Pen.
This is coming for the U.S. next. We have the same angry young people + elite institutions that support the red-green alliance and are itching for a revolution that brings down our government. The socialists want Marxism and expropriation of private property via "wealth taxes" and the like; the Islamists want a Sharia state and are happy to use Palestinian sympathies to get there.
I hate to say it, but once the writing is on the wall like this, the only rational defense is fascism. That is coming in the U.S. because, notwithstanding the power of the red-green alliance and certain Left institutions allied with them (NYT, ivy league universities, the professoriate, etc.), there are still hundreds of millions of Americans that are not going to sit idly while our cities burn down and our pockets are emptied for UBI schemes and new embassies to receive Hamas. The reaction to the revolution though, may be just as bad as the revolution itself. Dark times are coming.
xdre | 6 hours ago
I already had a gigantic issue with what you were writing because you predictably blame those without power instead of the real culprits, but this?
> I hate to say it, but once the writing is on the wall like this, the only rational defense is fascism.
Jesus Christ.
USPoster | 6 hours ago
🧠🔬😔
RagePoop | 6 hours ago
lmao unabashed support for fascism.
Yeah it's definitely immigrants and young people who are at fault, not the fact that 8 men own 1/2 of everything.
SilvertonguedDvl | 5 hours ago
You, uh, you know there are western nations that already have wealth taxes and are doing fine, right?
It is nowhere near as apocalyptic as the political right keeps fetishistically telling you it is - and most of the other issues people are upset about are also fairly readily addressed. The problem is Republicans have been blocking, repealing, or spending billions convincing people like yourself that they are completely nonviable.
As far as Islamists go - countering them is as simple as anticorruption laws and enshrining human rights into law that run contrary to Sharia. Strengthen separation of church and state laws. If you get really desperate you could do what some other nations have started to do and consider religious indoctrination a form of child abuse due to the psychological impact of religious trauma. Or... a hundred other fairly straight forward options that are only an issue if you hypocritically want to have a Christian theocracy while opposing an Islamic theocracy.
Charming-Topic9411 | 5 hours ago
Ah yes, the great solution of going full Nazi.
Aesma42 | an hour ago
Fascist billionaires are running your country right now. Are they solving anything ?
w3woody | 9 hours ago
The real dilemma for Europe (and note that there are similar riots, though over different issues, in other European countries) is that decades of slow growth/low growth policies that arose as a result of EU regulations have led to a situation where there simply isn't enough tax money available to continue to fund generous welfare policies.
It's like that game of musical chairs: the music just stopped, everyone rushed for a chair--and the people left standing are now angry. And rightfully so.
But I personally cannot honestly see how Europe solves this problem. The reality is, you can tax rich companies--but you slow growth even further. You can tax the wealthy--but they're slippery like cats: they can just slip out the door to some other location. Or you can engage in regulatory reform which makes it easier for companies to hire and fire and for people to start new businesses--but that requires some very politically unpopular reform, such as making it easier to terminate employees and, to some extent, reducing or eliminating worker and consumer protections.
And none of these changes, even if they would work, will work overnight. Even corporate regulatory reform that creates a more ‘business-friendly' environment takes at least a decade to show real progress--while the damage such regulatory reforms cause to workers would be felt immediately.
I fear Europe is in a tail-spin, and I don't know what the outcome of all of this will be.
SerenditiouslyLive | 8 hours ago
I think cutting pensions would be a big start, but nobody can actually do that because there are less younger voters than there are senior voters. It's democracy baby.
Apprehensive-Aide265 | 8 hours ago
The older generation will strangle the youger ones.
Runfasterbitch | 7 hours ago
They’re currently doing that, both in Europe and in the USA. The current generation of elderly people is consuming multiple times in social benefits what they paid in. These outlays must be reigned in, or their children, and grandchildren will be the ones to suffer
maplecremecookie | 6 hours ago
They don't give a single fuck if their children and grandchildren suffer.
Elegant-Somewhere213 | 5 hours ago
I don't think "multiple times" is anywhere close to true of the U.S.
Check our the report: SOCIAL SECURITY & MEDICARE LIFETIME BENEFITS & TAXES: 2020
Runfasterbitch | 4 hours ago
It is absolutely true. I have been giving a lecture throughout 2026 detailing this problem specifically at top economics departments across the USA. The average Medicare beneficiary today is expected to receive 3.5X the amount in benefits compared to what they paid in (inflation adjusted). We are stealing the economic future of our children to continue propping this program up, and it’s despicable
Elegant-Somewhere213 | 4 hours ago
First, you may not be including what the employer's paid on the employee's behalf. If so, problem solved, and that should be included as part of total compensation.
If not, I would question from whence your data came. The report from the Brookings Institute I refence above can be downloaded here and has the data.
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/103243/social-security-and-medicare-lifetime-benefits-and-taxes-2020_0.pdf
Runfasterbitch | 3 hours ago
Of course I included it
Elegant-Somewhere213 | 3 hours ago
Maybe this report is wrong. I'm not sure where they calculated their numbers and I haven't studied it. You seem like you have. Either way, I think we start means testing and I think we'll be ok.
Jscapistm | 14 minutes ago
I mean you can't suddenly start means testing a program that you promised people for their entire working lives, would not be more means tested, and was sold as a truly universal program. That completely fundamentally breaks trust in a government. Even reducing payments universally would be better than that.
Elegant-Somewhere213 | 3 hours ago
From Page 7:
TABLE 3 Expected Present Value of Lifetime Social Security and Medicare Benefits and Taxes
Single male ($89,600 in 2020 dollars) turning 65 in 2010
SS Benefit Medicare Benefit Total SS Taxes Medicare Taxes Total
$410,000 $190,000 $600,000 430,000 102,000 532,000
One-Performer-7961 | 5 hours ago
Somehow the French ultra left communist and anarchists were the ones fighting in the streets on behalf of the rent collecting gerontocracy in 2023
SpineSurgeon24 | 7 hours ago
The younger generation can smother the older generation with pillows in their beds in their nursing homes.
Forsaken_Code_9135 | 5 hours ago
Younger generations are not requesting cutting pension either. They are, for the most part, actually supporting the fight for greater pensions, younger.
The French, both young and old, just want the president to invent wealth and distribute it generously. And if he can't, let's fire him and put in charge someone who can.
Antaris181 | 2 hours ago
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
The_Real_BenFranklin | 45 minutes ago
The youth aren’t even fighting to lower pensions though - they protest whenever the retirement ages is proposed to go up.
Amadon29 | 7 hours ago
After learning about how hard it is to even get a permanent career in France as a young person, I'm surprised that that reform for making it easier to fire people isn't more popular. Every young person just constantly job hops every like 6 months hoping that the next one will be the last. Wtf is that system?
Surf_Solar | 6 hours ago
It's a complex subject but I think it's taboo because it would be primarily seen as a loss of labor rights (which France is VERY proud of), but we should also not forget that young people are leveraged to the tits with mortgages that don't account for that change.
The_Real_BenFranklin | 46 minutes ago
Because people love labor rights and never recognize the costs. They can’t connect that making firing too hard directly makes hiring hard.
atjoad | 8 hours ago
>You can tax the wealthy--but they're slippery like cats: they can just slip out the door to some other location.
Most can't, and those who can already did. Take Bernard Arnault. He tried to "make it" in America because of the French socialist administration of 1981 (the one who created the wealth tax, later repealed by Macron). He came back after a few years and being scammed like a dumbass. On the contrary, Stephane Bancel CEO of Moderna who became a billionaire in the US will never come back to France, even if france would somehow evolve into a tax heaven.
In real life, any random skilled professional has much better chances of making it anywhere in the world than billionaires. Billionaires owe their absurd success to exceptional circumstances and very specific context. By definition, it cannot statistically be replicated elsewhere. Arnault is the textbook example of it to a comical point, the added value of his luxury trinkets is irremediably tied to France PR.
SilvertonguedDvl | 5 hours ago
Not to mention that the wealthy get where they are by providing a supply to meet some demand and that supply can be met by literally anybody else.
I forget the name but one country lost a bunch of stupidly wealthy people and the consequence was that the wealth that normally flowed to them instead flowed to dozens of other organizations, effectively creating hundreds of new millionaires. None were as stupendous wealthy, but society was still having its needs met and was arguably healthier for it.
Plus you've got wealth flight laws that basically say if you're above a certain net worth half your shit is left at the border on the way out, figuratively speaking. You're free to leave but you're not allowed to casually extract value from the economy and then just ship it somewhere else.
DueCompany4790 | 5 hours ago
They tried bringing in African's to help with growth, but then African's came and sat on welfare.
Which is hilarious, fuck the French and Germans.
xdre | 3 hours ago
That tends to happen when you bring in immigrants and then don't let them participate as full members of society. I don't know what other outcome they expected.
DueCompany4790 | 3 hours ago
I think this is what happens when migrants are severely uneducated compared to the native population and have no inherent desire to work.
They get frustrated that they aren't being given more, when they really deserve nothing.
xdre | 3 hours ago
...and there it is. I had hopes you weren't gonna do it but you whipped out the unfounded bigotry anyway.
DueCompany4790 | 3 hours ago
Your article notes 50% don't have a diploma
22% have no qualifications at all
67% are unable to find work a year after arriving in France
Since you're able to google, why don't you check the rankings of education in France vs Africa?
Maybe it will help you understand the difference between the quality of education received in Africa vs France.
"Unfounded bigotry" lmao.
xdre | 2 hours ago
Also from the same article showing more educated African immigrants than European:
> One in three immigrants was able to find work within a year of arriving in France. Europeans were the most likely to enter the workforce quickly, with more than half employed within 12 months of arrival.
Unfounded bigotry. I said what I said.
DueCompany4790 | 2 hours ago
>Also from the same article showing more educated African immigrants than European:
Unfortunately you can't read.
This is total numbers, not by %.
The article is not saying "a higher percentage of immigrants from Africa are educated compared to Europe".
It's talking about how immigration from Europe in raw numbers is down from 2006 compared to Africa.
>Unfounded bigotry. I said what I said.
It's very obvious you just saw the headline after googling and didn't read the article itself.
xdre | an hour ago
> Unfortunately you can't read.
Unfortunately for you, I can read.
> This is total numbers, not by %.
Yes. The total numbers of educated, qualified immigrants is up significantly, and significantly more immigrants are now coming from Africa than from Europe.
So for your argument that African immigrants have less education than European immigrants to work, the education levels should be in decline.
They are not. In fact, the opposite occurred.
Aesma42 | an hour ago
Macron has been doing that for 10 years. It is slow to take effect indeed.
ThrowRawayacctr | an hour ago
"we can't tax rich because they will run away!!". Lol Seize their assets and their companies.
The_Real_BenFranklin | 45 minutes ago
I’m sure disregarding personal property rights will have no second order impacts on the French economy.
Were_all_dead_anyhow | 6 hours ago
It's not just Europe, it's the entire democratic world and its not coincidental. It's always been about Democracy and collective ownership of the sovereign authority of the state, not taxes. People really don't connect history and geopolitics/power to economic systems, and look at all of this stuff in a vacuum of honest math about taxes and spending.
Because the workers / lower classes in Western countries are starting to question the status of the social contract and their financial situations. The pattern of control repeats throughout history; when the working class begins to challenge economic inequality, elites leverage right-wing populist movements to protect their interests. Amplifying nationalist rhetoric and cultural division, use of sabotage provocateurs, media spin, wealth fractures working-class solidarity and divert attention away from systemic financial grievances, effectively maintaining the economic status quo through harsher social controls, deregulation, and further privatization of the publics assets.
So why is this happening broadly across the entire West? All of that sounds like it would be isolated to specific countries and economies.
Because almost the entire Western world is slaved by its sovereign creditors.
We are intentionally mired in debt, and when a state is reliant on creditors to buy its debt and avoid economic collapse, the state’s foreign and domestic policies conform to the interests of international finance and geopolitics rather than the moral will of its citizenry or even the economic stability of the country.
This entire pipeline relies on central banks, and the reason why modern financial mercantilism is buckling is because of an intrinsic paradox rooted in Keynesian economics. In regards to central banks, if a currency is truly managed for domestic sovereign needs, it cannot be perfectly coordinated with a foreign nation's competing needs. The call for international coordination is an admission that national central planning of money creates global distortions that the planners cannot control and, eventually, those leveraged distortions catch up with and mathematically declare winners and losers among those wealthy nations. The loser then scrambles the "old way" of achieving the same end-goals, via war, pillage, domestic repression across all aspects of life. Central banks keep fighting the Mundell-Fleming model, but eventually these coordinating banks have to confront each other, and the consequences ripple across the world.
People get hung up on the image of physical ownership of the chattel slave, when the end goal is what people should focus on; the fundamental logic of slavery is the elite extraction of labor and resources from a lower class. When you own sovereign debt, structural coercion is the new modern debt bondage. Under chattel slavery, masters bore the cost of feeding and housing captives, whereas debt bondage functions as a highly efficient upgrade where workers are financialized through student loans, housing, medical debt, etc., forcing them to police themselves and work indefinitely just to service the interest. When the people want services to improve in a democratic state, the politicians shrug and say "we can't afford it".
You are left with a democracy that strictly prioritizes system preservation by funding debt servicing, police, and surveillance, over public welfare because state stability is tied to financial markets and social control. Interest payments to private creditors are treated as legally non-negotiable to prevent economic collapse, ensuring the financial class is paid first. The resulting inequality and declining public services, popular unrest naturally rises, prompting politicians to aggressively fund security and surveillance apparatuses to suppress people and guarantee order.
Financial class has a deadman's switch on the entire western world, so you get Epstein-pedos, 08' collapses, drug money laundering, industrial disasters, etc. without consequence outside of a token sacrifice.
Whenever the people of a country have had enough, the creditor-class resorts to scapegoats and amplifying tangible leverage over necessities: The domestic "Other", usually immigrants and minorities, the "Leach" like welfare and unions, and/or the "Enemy" as a means to gin up a war to purge/emotionally exhaust your angry and poor men abroad before they stand against you at home. Place pressure of basic necessities to render the public docile and obedient. Psychologically, perpetual economic panic triggers a state of learned helplessness. When people are trapped in a constant fight-or-flight response over whether they can afford groceries or heating, their cognitive bandwidth is entirely monopolized by immediate survival.
What everyone needs to remember is not to repeat history and point at history's favorite evergreen scapegoat that always gets wrapped up in financial conspiracy. Guilty parties often hide behind and are of the community,, but it is not the entire cohort; shield and protect that community so that it is harder for these people to hide behind it. Similarly, your grievance isn't with capitalism, its with finance; don't allow them to weaponize and bundle you with communist bullshit.
It's been going on for ~600 years, yet people are surprised when it dawns on them. Let alone that the US revolution was specifically in response to this dynamic around currency, banking, and corporatization, not all that bullshit about tea and taxes.
The old aristocracy did not vanish when the West democratized; it adapted, corporatized, and institutionalized. Feudal titles became trusts, offshore funds, and family offices. Modern wealth preservation strategies prioritize low-risk, compounding returns backed by state-enforced taxation, these families heavily populate the institutional creditor class. Quietly absorbing the working class's taxes through sovereign debt servicing, legalizing their own tax avoidance strategies, and maintaining the extraction of wealth while elected politicians take the public blame for crumbling public services.
poincares_cook | 7 hours ago
There is one more thing that you did not mention. Cut pensions and in some countries like France, raise retirement age.
Europe is truly fucked in the sense that making it easier to fire people during the age of AI is going to be extremely extremely unpopular and frankly may not even less to growth as many companies are careful with hiring and assessing the situation.
ohh-welp | an hour ago
Europe can be the test case, allowing the U.S. to watch from the outside and see exactly what not to do.
It’s been entertaining watching Reddit praising universal healthcare, free tuition, and generous pensions while completely ignoring its lack of technological innovation, as if these massive social programs can exist without a thriving, growth-driven economy.
Misschienn | 49 minutes ago
You're acting like these things are mutually exclusive
buscuitsANDgravy | 11 hours ago
It boils down to welfare costs. They may have to cut down on welfare If they don’t want the European Central Bank to intervene and enforce austerity measures
ME7112345 | 10 hours ago
The ECB does not enforce austerity measures. You may be thinking of the role of the european commission and the IMF within the troika.
Standupaddict | 4 hours ago
The ECB was part of the third party of the troika, along with the other two parties you mentioned.
ME7112345 | 4 hours ago
Yes, that is why I mentioned the troika. It's not a coincidence.
jokikinen | 9 hours ago
They can balance the budget in whatever way they prefer. It’s not for us to say.
What we can demand, instead, is for the French to get on it, choose a direction, stay the course, and get it solved.
If French voters fail to press balanced finances, it will increase poverty all over Europe even though the rest of Europe is entirely innocent when it comes to how France budgets.
Dapper_Bus5069 | 39 minutes ago
>What we can demand, instead, is for the French to get on it, choose a direction, stay the course, and get it solved.
They won't. They were told all their lives that the State was there for them, they know nothing about economy, budget etc... because the State takes care of everything and do everything for them, they don't have to worry about it. Most of the French don't even know how the pension system works, when you ask them they they describe some kind of capitalization scheme made for them by the State and that their pension is just the money they gave before and the State giving it back with interests... which is somehow funny, because if you ask them what they think about capitalization they will probably say it's the worst thing in the world...
More than half of the population receive more money from the State than what they pay, and no one is ready to give up the part they have... this country will just implode before reducing anything in the budget, you want to change anything and everyone go to the streets and burn cars...
Ok-Meal-1826 | 9 hours ago
They can instead tax wealth (for example over 5M)
But cutting welfare is always easier...
MartinBP | 8 hours ago
The entire wealth of all French billionaires put together would fund the budget for 4 months. You have no clue how much money a state deals with.
Own_Proposal3827 | 9 hours ago
They tried that and it didn’t work because wealth taxes notoriously suck at raising revenue
Ok-Meal-1826 | 9 hours ago
When did they tried that?
There is plenty of sucessfull attempts thru out history...
Wealth taxes make a society more equitable.
And more equitable societies lead to less crime and better quality of life to everyone.
What you have now, is a society where all wealth stays at the top,
And now you have people rioting in the streets fighting for scrap's
MartinBP | 8 hours ago
Why are you in an economics sub if you just want to spout fairytales?
Own_Proposal3827 | 9 hours ago
Google is free, bot
rpolkcz | 5 hours ago
France had wealth tax between 1988 and 2017. It was cancelled because it lead to lower tax revenue than not having it.
walkingthecowww | 9 hours ago
Unfortunately there’s not enough wealth at this point.
Ok-Meal-1826 | 9 hours ago
There is plenty
Like, we are living in unprecedented times.
There is more wealth now that in any part of history
It's just not well distributed...
You now have people with the wealth of nations paying less taxes that your average citizen...
[OP] laxnut90 | 8 hours ago
Maybe in some countries, but not in France.
Even a wealth tax would struggle to pay for their pension scheme which has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world and pays more than the average worker earns.
Also, the last time France tried a wealth tax, the wealthy just left the country. France is part of the EU where people can move countries easily.
AK_Panda | 2 hours ago
Honestly, they have to redo their pension scheme. Everyone else has to as well, but Frances is on another level. It completely unsustainable.
Though I'm not convinced the wealth tax removal (or any other tax cuts) has lead to any major improvement to their economy overall. Kinda looks like revenue replaced with debt and little meaningful benefit to be seen.
polloasado81 | 9 hours ago
Trouble is countries and tax payers want the wealthy, they don't want welfare recipients.
Go to any wealthy area, then go to a high welfare recipient area, worldwide. Which one has better paying jobs and is nicer?
Ok-Meal-1826 | 9 hours ago
This happens because wealth is super concentrate at the top.
Only wealthy people have money
So everything that doesn't involve them does not pay for a living
This does not mean that we should only favor wealthy people
This means that we have a problem with wealth distribution
psycho__penguin | 8 hours ago
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury."
Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813)
buzzmaster17 | 7 hours ago
I think the French are delusional, and I want to rant about this for a second.
You guys have this economy that is centered around consumption, which has outpaced what your country's productive base can sustain, and were fine with it for decades. Imo, this was enabled in the past by having access to zero-interest debt/cheap debt, along with having the Francafrique sphere in Africa, where you had central banks in the Sahel region store their FX reserves in the French Treasury, speak French, and allow France to gain access to the resources/commodities in the region, which made it very easy for French companies to process said resources in higher-value industries, provide services around them, and capture a larger share of the value generated further up the economic chain.
But since both of these things are disappearing and are harder to access (there is no cheap debt available anymore, and the Françafrique sphere is being dismantled), you have a nation that is accustomed to a standard of living that can no longer be maintained.
I don't understand why, with decades of money flowing in, the French government/people never tried to set up anything that would allow them to perform strongly domestically or an economic model that wasn't so dependent on the factors I mentioned earlier. Instead, they just assumed that people would give them money forever.
I think the French people should accept austerity and understand that for the French economy to be sustainable, people are going to have to give things up. It might be the elderly who will be forced to retire later and get smaller payments from the government, or the young should accept poor services and less development.
I also don't really understand the tax the rich/socialism angle that people talk about. Even if you taxed every billionaire and high-net-worth person in France and took all of their money, the money would get sucked into the black hole that is the French economy, and in less than a couple of years you would be protesting again, asking for more.
It's a structural issue, meaning that no matter how much money you throw at it, it will persist. France has near-zero GDP growth this year and has had weak growth for several years before, and it has a population that is increasingly elderly, with more people retiring with pensions that will need to be paid out by the government. They are bleeding money every year trying to support these people, and it's only going to get worse as the proportion of the population that is elderly continues to increase. Just accept high taxes and lower living standards and care for your elderly.
The world that enabled you to exist like this doesn't exist anymore. Accept it and move on. Maybe try and leave the country if you're young, or just accept lower living standards. France should still exist in 50 years; it might be stagnant and a bit dilapidated, but it's better than it not existing, right?
mcchicken_deathgrip | 4 hours ago
Someone gets it. It's social democracy reaching a breaking point by hampering growth, now the tab is coming due and there's not enough new growth to sustain itself. Something will have to give but french workers understandably are not willing to accept lower standards of living or cuts in social services. The tab will soon come due across most of western Europe as well. So far they seem to have no answer.
Lachokrampfo | 4 hours ago
I think people might be willing to accept hardships if those hardships were distributed equally. Hardships only affecting the lower income classes will never be willingly accepted.
Wide_Lock_Red | 2 hours ago
What would that look like in practice?
Cutting pensions and raising VAT would hit everyone, but I doubt that would be accepted as "equal".
Koutei | an hour ago
VAT is extremely unfair, since lower classes spend all their income in consumption goods. So even if they have a low tax rate, they end up contributing the most in % from their income.
Meanwhile, the flat tax is still at 31% no matter your income, and it's extremely easy to not pay much taxes if you know what to do (holdings, etc). Not even talking about the 100k€ donation per parent every 15 years, and basically you end up with the majority of the population getting poorer while the rich doubled their financial worth since the Covid.
Le_Zoru | 27 minutes ago
Distribute taxes in a way where middle classes pay less than higher classes would be a good start
stonedturtle69 | 5 hours ago
Your tax the rich section argues against something nobody is proposing. The actual Zucman tax is a 2% annual levy on fortunes above €100m, affecting around 1,800 households. Estimates range from €5bn to €25bn a year. That's a recurring tax, not a one-off seizure that gets "used up", and even the low end is a meaningful share of the €54bn in savings the government is looking for in 2027.
Also the real case for the Zucman tax is fairness. The average French effective tax rate, counting all taxes and social contributions, is around 50%. For billionaires, the effective rate drops to about 26%, roughly half, because most of their income sits untaxed in holding companies. Nobody will accept austerity while that gap exists. Telling people to accept high taxes and austerity while ruling out taxing those most able to actually pay is completely unreasonable and unjust.
buzzmaster17 | 5 hours ago
The point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't matter whether you tax the ultra-wealthy 2% a year, 10% a year, 20% a year, or even confiscate a huge amount of their wealth in one go. It doesn't solve France's structural fiscal problem.
France and many other European countries issued enormous amounts of debt during the 2010s when borrowing costs were extremely low in order to maintain the high-consumption economies that Europe is known for. That debt doesn't disappear or stay cheap forever. As it matures, it has to be refinanced at today's much higher rates. France's annual interest bill is already around €65bn and is expected to rise towards or beyond €100bn by the end of the decade.
So you can raise €25bn from a wealth tax now, and it would help with government savings, but several years from now a large part of that revenue will be absorbed by the increase in debt-service costs. Then what? Raise the wealth tax again? Billionaires don't have infinite money, they have a finite amount available to them.
And that's before dealing with demographics. Taxing billionaires doesn't create more workers or fewer pensioners. France is becoming increasingly old, meaning a smaller working population will have to finance pensions, healthcare, and other services for a growing retired population.
That is why it is a structural problem. You can tax wealthy people to get them to pay more, and they should pay more, but it doesn't solve the gap between what France needs to pay in order to function and what its economy can actually sustain. That gap keeps getting bigger each year.
You cannot permanently solve an expanding annual flow problem by repeatedly taxing a finite stock of private wealth. It just doesn't work.
stonedturtle69 | 4 hours ago
Any saving, whether a tax or a spending cut, gets partly absorbed as cheap 2010s debt matures and gets refinanced at higher rates, so the "then what?" argument works both ways. It only shows that addressing the deficit will require several measures at once. And a 2% tax on fortunes that grow faster than 2% a year means that only a part of the return is being taxed. It is incorrect to picture this as depleting a finite stock.
The bigger misunderstanding is that France is not a poor country. It is a rich country with a poor / indebted state. Households hold around €15tr in net wealth, more than four times the public debt, and private wealth has grown far faster than national income since the 1970s, so taxing capital more like labour taps a base that has been expanding for decades.
It is true that the ageing demographics put a strain on public finances but this can be addressed by prudent and solidaristic policies too. For instance, the pension system can be made fairer and cheaper by compressing them at the top while preserving a decent floor. This can be done by lowering the ceiling on pensionable earnings and tapering replacement rates as income rises while guaranteeing a minimum pension at 85% of the net minimum wage. This would mean taxing high pensions at the same rate as wages, and basing retirement on years worked rather than age.
No single tax closes a 5% deficit, but neither does putting the whole burden on pensioners and the young and imposing permanent austerity. Britain tried a permanent austerity approach in the 19th century to reduce its debt. It took them a century to do so.
buzzmaster17 | 3 hours ago
I don't think it's wrong to view fortunes as a depletable stock. A 2% wealth tax may be sustainable when returns are comfortably above 2%, but returns can fluctuate, and government policy can change when fiscal pressures increase. Wealth is not an immutable stock that automatically generates positive returns forever.
Part of the issue I have with the idea is what happens after the tax becomes established. Future governments can raise the rate, lower the threshold, broaden the tax base from the ultra-wealthy to people who are merely wealthy or doing well, or layer additional taxes on capital on top of it.
Something introduced as a narrowly targeted tax can therefore become much broader over time, while also creating stronger incentives for capital to move elsewhere. You could eventually end up with something that was originally intended to target the ultra-wealthy becoming another tax borne by a much wider section of society, while the people with the most mobile capital are also the best positioned to avoid it.
There is historical precedent for taxes expanding after their introduction. VAT in the UK, Social Security payroll taxes in the US, and France's former ISF wealth tax all changed substantially over time through higher rates, broader bases, or additional brackets. This obviously doesn't prove that a 2% wealth tax would inevitably follow the same path, but it is why I wouldn't treat 2% as a permanent ceiling. I could easily see a narrowly targeted tax gradually becoming something that affects a much broader section of the population.
There is also the issue of tax incidence. Just because a tax is legally imposed on wealthy people does not mean they necessarily bear the entire economic cost themselves. People with substantial capital, business ownership, or market power may be better positioned to shift some of that cost onto consumers, workers, tenants, or others with less bargaining power.
I realize this makes me sound pro-billionaire or pro-bourgeois, which I'm not. My broader point is that I don't think the answer to an economy built around excessive consumption, persistent deficits, and ever-increasing debt is simply finding another group to tax. At some point, the level of rampant consumption and public spending itself needs to be looked at, and some level of downsizing has to occur.
The pension reforms you suggest also make sense, but that doesn't solve the fact that the law won't pass due to the makeup of the country. French pensioners and older voters are the country's largest and most politically influential voting bloc, and they have little incentive to support reforms that reduce their own benefits.
Other groups also behave the same way: students want more education funding, teachers want higher pay, households want lower taxes, and pensioners want their benefits protected. You end up with a situation where nearly everyone agrees that the fiscal position has to improve, but each group would rather somebody else absorb the cost.
That is why I keep coming back to austerity and acceptance. I'm using the term broadly to mean fiscal consolidation through some combination of lower government spending and higher taxes.
Mountain_Snow3613 | an hour ago
You're not wrong that the wealth tax alone will not solve the problem. But your argument is also not in good faith. Yes: taxing billionaires at the same rate that the rest of France pays won't solve the problem completely. But implying that taxing billionaires at a fair rate is pointless because it won't 100% solve the problem is also a very morally questionable path to take.
Also you implied that reducing pensions and reducing education spending are equally reasonable options for France. France's pension system is out of control. Their education system is relatively underfunded. These two choices are not equally valid.
Not to mention that the elderly control nearly all of the wealth in France... if anyone needs to take a hit it's not the youth....
NGS_King | 4 hours ago
It’s easy to say this from a macro perspective, and a lot harder when you’re facing the brunt of it. I know little about economics, but I know that when faced with a shitty situation in a democracy you’re supposed to make noise about it. Even if austerity is the right call, when the austerity comes at the cost of people’s healthcare, education, and future, that’s too big a cost for many people.
Emumonk | 2 hours ago
The elderly only need the current system to outsurvive them. So long as there’s a majority who believe they can coast the rest of their life in the current system nothing will change.
Dapper_Bus5069 | 56 minutes ago
The main problem is 45 year of politicians telling them it was possible, and some politicians today still say we can perfectly put back the retirement age at 60 without any problem, "we will tax xxx and that's it"...
cac_init | 3 hours ago
>You guys have this economy that is centered around consumption, which has outpaced what your country's productive base can sustain, and were fine with it for decades.
This is true for all Werstern countries, though. The US more than any other - which is why the US is currently being dismantled by MAGA.
GruePwnr | 2 hours ago
The US is so wildly productive that even political turmoil and pointless wars can't stop the growth.
ThrowRawayacctr | an hour ago
It's not? If you count the AI bubble inflating growth then sure, but remove that and it's the same pace as France.
Who made you believe that lol
GruePwnr | 36 minutes ago
Growth is growth is growth.
pibbleberrier | an hour ago
THIS.
Socialism can work is the private sector is allow to proliferate.
fct1ous | an hour ago
The US is not being "dismantled" by MAGA in any economic sense. You're looking at it purely from an international relations perspective which is subjective on its own.
The US GDP per capita is double that of France and and overall 2026 GDP growth is on track to be about three times France's in 2026. The only thing it has in common is a debt problem, which the US is far better positioned to deal with than France is.
ComprehensivePhase20 | 2 hours ago
The paragraph about taxing the rich is making a lot of assumptions. When the gov says we need to cut into public education and such to find 15 billions but offers 40 billions to Amazon and such in the same breath, there is legitimate criticism to be had.
Facktat | 11 hours ago
I think the French government should make a referendum where people have to choose whether they want all these benefits while all taxes go up x% or no tax increase and then go with whichever of both people vote for.
AspiringCanuck | 11 hours ago
The protestors do have valid grievances. France is spending too much on pensioners and corporate handouts.
5-6% of GDP just goes to corporate subsidies, a big chunk of that is a general social security contribution exemption on employer payrolls,
14-15% of GDP is going to general pensioners. But there is a hidden pensioner payment problem that has cropped up that is not included in the general pensioner numbers, *huge* amounts of sectoral budgets are going to Pensioners. 32% of France's National Education Ministry goes to Pensions. And 30% of France's Interior Ministry's budget is also now just Pension payouts.
This has created a "crowding out" effect where funds intended for active public services are diverted to historical retirement obligations.
And then of course there is healthcare, where 11 to 12% of GDP goes to healthcare, which overly is consumed (understandably) by the elderly. When you combine healthcare + pensioner spending, that is 40% of all public spending is now just absorbed by the elderly.
Put this in perspective: ages 50 to 79 hold 61% of the total gross wealth in France, despite making up just 50% of the households. You may say that this is normal: elderly people had more time to save and buy assets, except, in the past in France, household wealth typically peaked at age 55, and then assets were spent down. Public pensions have basically increased rather substantially compared to how much they used to pay (in inflation adjusted amounts) decades ago, and compounding matters is when the retirement age was lowered from 65 to 60. For decades after WWII, pensions were pegged to active worker salaries. Even though pensions are now indexed to inflation rather than wage growth, the initial calculation rates for the Baby Boomer generation were incredibly generous.
The cohort born in the 1950s and early 1960s retired under a mathematical formula that was highly favorable. In France, a retiree's net pension replacement rate averaged 74.4% of their last paycheck (which is 14 points above the OECD average, for comparison, Germany's is 52.9%). Because their initial calculation gave them roughly three-quarters of their final salary, their starting baseline was incredibly high. Future generations have had that door already closed statutorily, meanwhile the boomers are absorbing the maximum pension possible in real-terms compared to future generations while also sitting on the most assets that any Pensioner generation has had, ever.
Asking younger generations to face austerity, when they already have had so much of their public service budgets eaten alive to service Pensioners, but Pensioners are not being asked to face any real austerity or to pay any taxes on their assets or capital cash flows or (the property tax reform meant to make PT assessments fairer, has continued to be pushed back against, for example) the fact pensioners get special tax breaks. It comes off as just unfairly asymmetric; the young is being asked to sacrifice whereas the old, not so much. Lack of shared sacrifice flies in the face of the social contract just rubs the wrong the way. Hard for policies to survive that. Pensioners are going to have to face pain, the question is how much. The harder they try to prevent paying any real price, the riskier things become politically (unrest).
jovialfaction | 9 hours ago
And yet the party participating to the current protest the most (LFI) campaigns on retirement at 60 and indexing all pensions on wages so wage growth will never catch up to the pension
azerty543 | 8 hours ago
Not only that, Le Pen says she will lower the pension age, not raise it.
AlorsViola | 8 hours ago
It doesn't help that the average pensioner is making more than the average worker.
fryxharry | 9 hours ago
The problem is people in France will not understand this. The sentiment is pensioners have earned what they get and additional money for other things is just a matter of the government deciding it's there. People in France in my experience have very little understanding or sense of responsibility for the state budget.
PictureSame5725 | 9 hours ago
Let them face the music then, hubris needs to be taught a very harsh lesson.
soozerain | 7 hours ago
Expect a lot more rioting then
PictureSame5725 | 6 hours ago
That is ultimately gonna only make things worse for populace. First armed forces will start with lethal rounds and if they fail to control then the anarchy will anyway make France a living hell. If the people want to create a failed state then so be it, they will serve as a warning to rest of the world.
soozerain | 6 hours ago
Well I wouldn’t go that far but yeah I can see a lot of short term pain in the near future.
PictureSame5725 | 6 hours ago
Are they willing to take that short term pain ? The people and populists both seem hellbent on exacerbating the debt problem.
AromaticIndustry4829 | 8 hours ago
This. They can't have an honest conversation about it. people just read headlines and get mad.
TaxLawKingGA | 8 hours ago
That sentiment isn’t just France. Look at all of the people pushing to increase the income limit on payroll taxes in order to replenish the SS Trust Fund? Yet many of those same people want to cut benefits for future retirees.
artbystorms | 8 hours ago
I've never met a single person that wants to remove the SS payroll cap AND cut benefits....
It's pretty much Dems want to remove the cap to tax the rich more to replenish it
GOP wants to cut SS and ultimately privatize it.
AtomWorker | 8 hours ago
It's not those pensioners' fault that the government was too generous in decades past. Everyone has to bear the burden because it's unfair to pin this solely on those who've been paying into the system for 40-50 years.
Aesma42 | 7 hours ago
Who elected these governments ?
fryxharry | 7 hours ago
Of course its the boomer pensioners fault, with their votes they make sure nobody can touch the pensions. Just because they paid into the system when the ratio between pensioners and working age populations was more favorable doesn't mean they now get to suck the state budget dry and leave nothing for other generations.
jokikinen | 9 hours ago
I don’t think people believe the grievances to be inconsequential. I think many people assume there are many groups in France with valid grievances.
HolyInlandEmpire | 8 hours ago
The obvious solution is to take on more debt so the problem falls on future generations, who currently have no grievances because they haven't been born!
Repeat for 5 decades.
BasedEmu | 8 hours ago
Yeah, boomer economics will become a heavier constraint to the country as decades go by. Theirs is insane, retirement at 60 lmao.
Amadon29 | 7 hours ago
You're completely right but France also bad riots at any kind of pension/retirement reform too. They're aware it's a problem. They can't do anything about it. Those initial very generous pension reforms that happened like 40 years ago are really starting hurt them but it's so much easier to add benefits to people than to take them away
Own_Proposal3827 | 9 hours ago
That’s every welfare state everywhere. If you don’t want to spend lots of public money on the elderly, don’t build a welfare state. Then by the time you’re elderly, you won’t have to worry about government spending.
harpers25 | 8 hours ago
"Spending too much on pensions" is basically the opposite of their grievance...
Demiu | 9 hours ago
None of what you listed are their grievances. Their actual grievances are "why won't the governmemt just swing the magic wand and hand out more money"
__Geg__ | 9 hours ago
Usually this happens, when a group has a tiny sliver of the pie, and someone tries to take that away. Not being able to articulate the structural drivers of why their pie is shrinking, does not invalid the defense of the pie.
Demiu | 8 hours ago
A rich person buying a stock for 0.01 more causing every other owner of that stock to have their valuation increased doesn't take away anything out of your pie. You can't convert financial assets like bonds or stocks into food or housing. They are literally nothing, they have no physical form, it's just a legal construct.
You know what IS shrinking your pie? A bunch of old people that consume the same things you need/want, but do not produce anything in return.
a_library_socialist | 9 hours ago
got a source for that quote?
Aesma42 | 7 hours ago
The opposition (LFI) said 10 billion euros are needed.
a_library_socialist | 7 hours ago
I don't see anything about a magic wand?
Aesma42 | 6 hours ago
Their whole platform is a combination of "the rich will pay" and magic money.
a_library_socialist | 6 hours ago
Oh, so it's not a magic wand. It's changing tax policy.
thegingerskull | 5 hours ago
In a way it will fail and make things worse than now, yeah
DaSemicolon | 8 hours ago
It’s not a quote
a_library_socialist | 8 hours ago
Oh, so you're just deciding to attribute things to the protesters because you feel like it?
Cool story, bro.
DaSemicolon | 8 hours ago
I’m not OC
Though it’s pretty obvious OC is using quotes as a summary/paraphrase of what the protesters want.
a_library_socialist | 8 hours ago
"I make shit up because I don't have an actual argument" says the OC.
Cool, this is useful.
DaSemicolon | 6 hours ago
It is an accurate summary. Protestors want to increase education funding without cutting services or raising taxes on themselves. Magic.
a_library_socialist | 3 hours ago
> or raising taxes on themselves. Magic.
Raising taxes on the rich is not magic. You just want to pretend it's not an option, wonder why?
WannabeAby | 8 hours ago
Or simply... They want things to work ? Have decent classroom ? Teachers ? And we can't for the reasons you were given ?
People aren't (mostly) stupid. We all understand there is contraints. But when you live in a country missing 10% of its teachers while you're giving away 100+b a year without ANY engagement for companies ? And when said companies have given 60b dividend last quarter while firing ?
Yeah, people are pissed.
Demiu | 8 hours ago
Giving away how?
WannabeAby | 2 hours ago
We have tax return program for companies called CIR (Research tax credit). Basically, as a private entity, you can declare a part of your work as "research".
But the definition is vague enough and the there is absolutely no control so, companies are declaring anything in it to maximize it.
Then, there is the infamous CICE. Same kind of bullshit. Lots of billions, no effect (multiple studies are saying so for each) and yet, the government won't budge on it.
I have no problem subsidizing private entities as long as it's controlled and aimed at developing key sectors. Here, we're simply throwing money away for nothing.
SilvertonguedDvl | 5 hours ago
Great post.
But also having your retirement benefits based on your final salary is completely insane and who the actual fuck thought that was a good idea?
ausoleil | 48 minutes ago
My French mother in law is a perfect example of this. She retired at 50 (special exemption as a preschool teacher). She is now 77. She has been retired for 27 years and has been retired for about the same amount as she has been working, possibly actually longer than she had been working. She is one of those toxic types who sucks out everyone’s life force and she is in excellent health and her own mother died at 98, so I’m pretty sure she’ll be around until her late 90’s. She owns three properties, two of which were likely purchased with her pension money.
PerformanceThick2232 | 7 hours ago
They are too stupid to understand- already you see nobrainers that tell "we need only to tax rich".
Golda_M | 11 hours ago
The purpose of democracy is to establish legitimacy and authority. It is not to establish truth, to create balances, uphold principles.. or govern.
In 2015 Greece's populist government held a referendum on whether or not to accept the troika bailout terms. They voted no. Then the government of Greece had to accept the terms anyway.
The vore issue is the common conception of democracy as a "fight for rights."
In the minds of many comma politics is all about struggle for rights. The society struggles for pension rights, and school funding, and housing rights, h ealthcare, etc. That is why/how those things come to be. Protests and other forms of struggle create them.
There is nowhere for issues like efficacy, tax balance or whatnot to even come into this conversation.
a_library_socialist | 10 hours ago
I mean, if you're saying that bourgeois democracy doesn't actually give power to common people, you're not wrong.
Golda_M | 10 hours ago
That is not what I am saying.
That is just old slogan-slop. It doeant mean anything.
Wyciorek | 11 hours ago
And the people will choose 3rd answer: just riot until they can eat the cake and have it too
MakeMoneyNotWar | 10 hours ago
The result will be the far right promising law and order gets voted into power
sovietbarbie | 9 hours ago
They will promise whatever they want, but Italy, a far right government, is having similar issues while Meloni has been promising us prosperity
soozerain | 7 hours ago
Does the Far Right even promise to slash the budget? I was under the impression they too were cowed and afraid to reform the welfare state just as much as the Left
fryxharry | 9 hours ago
And they will cut education budgets even more while curbing immigration, which will make the age pyramid issue even bigger.
old_ironlungz | 10 hours ago
Hmm I wonder what makes people so frustrated that they need to express it through rage for a month.
You must think it’s pretty trivial.
Wyciorek | 10 hours ago
They got conditioned to think that they just need to burn some buildings, loot some shops, maybe attack firefighters and then the government will just cave. That's absolutely not trivial.
Illustrious-Bit-4909 | 10 hours ago
I just watched a street interview with one of the Paris protesters: this is almost word for word exactly what they said needs to be done. The “government needs to fear the people”.
Reasonable_Fold6492 | 10 hours ago
The people of France are voting for le pen though
fryxharry | 9 hours ago
This has to do with the fact the people have very little say in what the government does. And the government is very centralized in the office of the President in Paris. If the policy of Paris is not what the people want, their only way to get heard is by protesting and striking. This is why protests and strikes are so common in France.
WoodpeckerVast2561 | 10 hours ago
You are mixing protesters and rioters here. People want decent schools. Nothing crazy. Thery protest due to the cost of life, one could think that taxing the wealth and building more social apartments to decrease the renting costs is also an option.
Wyciorek | 10 hours ago
>You are mixing protesters and rioters here.
Me? Rioters seem to be pretty well mixed with protesters in France. Why in so many countries people are capable for protesting without rioting?
>Thery protest due to the cost of life, one could think that taxing the wealth
France has already highest tax burden in EU. If I remember correctly, they had tax wealth before, then abandoned it since it turned out to be counterproductive: https://fortune.com/2026/01/27/california-france-wealth-tax-inequality/
>
and building more social apartments to decrease the renting costs is also an option.
Build with what money? France is already has more social spending (by % of GDP) than USSR did, it has large primary deficit and due to already enormous tax burden, no room to raise taxes any further. So where that money is supposed to come from?
WoodpeckerVast2561 | 9 hours ago
If you check a but deeper you will see that in lost of the cities there was peaceful protests from one side and looters on other places. Most of the people were behaving fine. Check in Italy, there were violence too. Same in Albania, it’s not only France. Still no one can excuse the looters and rioters actions but there are morons everywhere. Why did the police let that happen and mostly focused on the peaceful protesters is a good question.
There are a lot of taxes for the middle class, very less on the upper one, taxing inheritance over a certain amount could be done. Taxing the richest too but that’s not the way our government decided to go.
With which money? Well that’s the problem of bad decisions, getting money from the market to pay the pensions is idiot, getting some to invest in social programs like social apartments would be smarter.
France is a rich country despite its debt, the global amount that the boomers will leave to their kids is quite a lot, there will be some possibilities to recover from there in the coming years too.
Wyciorek | 9 hours ago
>France is a rich country despite its debt, the global amount that the boomers will leave to their kids is quite a lot, there will be some possibilities to recover from there in the coming years too.
France is indeed quite rich, but not as rich as the protesters believe. It has been basically keeping up appearances for decades while maxing out one credit card after another. In the end, the choices are :
- drastically cut spending (hello more riots)
- raise taxes (they are at breaking point)
- grow economy until tax to gdp is less of a problem (that would require actually having strong growth)
- inflate it away (hello even more riots). Not sure if that one is even possible anyway since ECB controls euro
And no, I don't think praying that grandpa dies soon is a solution to French problems.
jokikinen | 9 hours ago
The French need to rebuild trust in political institutions and some type of referendum, or other similar means to rebuild that could be worth considering.
But this question sort of has been on the ballot already and the decision has been split. The French voters are split and polarised.
Also, in reality, balancing a budget with only tax hikes or cutting benefits is a very difficult task. Asking what option people want of two not very feasible options might ultimately decrease trust as either promise is difficult to keep.
But I do think the French have to re find trust in each other, come around the same table and find a deal where everyone shares the hurt so equally that the deal can have political legitimacy. It’s not easy to achieve, but it’s necessary because France is past half measures.
Hopeful_Ad_7719 | 9 hours ago
I think those are called elections.
Sbrubbles | 9 hours ago
"All taxes go up x%" shows a misunderstanding of the protester position. Their position is "select taxes go up x%". Which ones that is depends on who you ask, but it may be corporate, wealth, income for the rich, whatever.
You want to call such a targeted tax irresponsible or inefectual or outright dangerous, then go ahead, that's a fine opinion to have, but don't confuse that the protesters are asking for.
andoke | 8 hours ago
That's the thing they are ok for taxes to go up if you ask them. Just for the richs or corps. But nowadays Richs and corps can pack up and move to the next country.
poshmarkedbudu | 8 hours ago
It's more than that. Government bonds, long term investment, etc.
Inevitable_Window308 | 6 hours ago
Capital flight is a myth. They can't move land, they can't move factories and you can tax those things all the same when the owner leaves along with a chunk of their wealth
rpolkcz | 5 hours ago
It literally already happened in France. They already had wealth tax. It lead to lower tax revenue. So they cancelled it and then tax revenue went back up.
Inevitable_Window308 | 5 hours ago
Thank you for proving yourself wrong. France currently has a wealth tax, they replaced the old one because they had difficulties enforcing it
Pomodoroo | 11 hours ago
The issue is that we are now collecting less through taxes than before, we have a gap of 2 percentage points of GDP that we’re not collecting any longer (€60bn) since Macron was elected. And we’re actively pouring state funds into mega corps that just up their dividend. Everyone would be ok with raising taxes for the upper 20% if it meant better redistribution
thegreatshark | 8 hours ago
France is already collecting 45% of GDP in taxes. Already one of the highest in the world. There comes a point where more taxes won’t really solve anything because the people paying the top brackets are the people that have the most mobility. E.g. Why would a highly specialized skilled worker choose to pay massive taxes when they could just move to Switzerland, or Germany and have roughly the same standard of living with comparatively much lower tax burden? And that’s before we even talk about billionaires who generally have even fewer roots in the community.
guyoffthegrid | 11 hours ago
Which particular taxes shall go up? All or only the income tax / vat which are easy(er) to enforce, but impact lower income people disproportionately more? Why not even discussing to raise taxes on the rich, like a wide wealth tax or increased property tax?
The topics is that simple. Plus (a significant portion of) people are stupid and easy to manipulate.
corwe | 11 hours ago
France used to have a wealth tax that was abolished as a net negative for the budget and the property tax already is progressive
vovap_vovap | 11 hours ago
France do not have that many "rich". It is most socialist state on a planet that is not under communist government.
a_library_socialist | 10 hours ago
> It is most socialist state on a planet
I must have missed where France nationalized its industries last week. Got a link?
SeltsamerNordlander | 10 hours ago
They do have more nationalised key industries than most western governments but that doesn't exactly make them socialist lol
vovap_vovap | 10 hours ago
Yeah, government spending to GDP is the biggest:
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-spending-to-gdp
(On this list Finland ahead for 2025 but France arguably ahead for 2026)
a_library_socialist | 10 hours ago
Oh, I see, you think socialism is when the government does stuff?
It's not.
vovap_vovap | 10 hours ago
I know what socialism is - I been learning that in school in socialist country 😄
Aesma42 | 6 hours ago
Electricity production is nationalized (EDF, with all its dams, nuclear power plants, etc.).
Rail is nationalized.
Pensions are nationalized.
Healthcare is nationalized.
Education is nationalized.
Police is nationalized.
The state has investment in major industries, like Airbus.
Macron nationalized a major shipyard, the Chantiers de l'Atlantique.
a_library_socialist | 6 hours ago
> Police is nationalized.
Holy shit this is some real lolbertarian hours in this post
SeltsamerNordlander | 11 hours ago
socialism is when government does things moment
vovap_vovap | 10 hours ago
What?
bobandgeorge | 9 hours ago
He said this is one of those moments where someone will think that any time a government does something, it's called socialism. You do not know what socialism is.
vovap_vovap | 9 hours ago
I already told other man - I do, I grow up in socialist country 😄
SeltsamerNordlander | 4 hours ago
I'm surrounded by people who grew up in a socialist country every day, yet they're no more knowledgeable than anyone else about it. In fact, due to the socialist government being a foreign occupier and the bias inherent from that, they're probably a lot less correct a lot more of the time than anyone else.
What made you think being born somewhere stops you from being mistaken about that somewhere?
vovap_vovap | 4 hours ago
Fact I am not "mistaken" and did seen that myself?
Fact I literally had course "scientific communism" is school there?
Fact that I know quite a bit of modern economy science?
Or fact that I also been yang and stupid like those idiots many years ago and know exactly what they (and you) think? 😄
bobandgeorge | 9 hours ago
Yes. Famously socialist country America.
vovap_vovap | 9 hours ago
Yeah, but I was not born there man.
moanonyme | 7 hours ago
r/confidentlyincorrect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_millionaires
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires
vovap_vovap | 7 hours ago
3.52% of population - so?
Seriously - what do you have to say?
moanonyme | 6 hours ago
France is 12th by millionnaires by Capita.
Does not look like "the most socialist state on the planet" to me m8
vovap_vovap | 6 hours ago
Exactly 12-th. And that "many reach" is your opinion?
moanonyme | 6 hours ago
Man, you were just spewing random rightist copaganda and got caught by facts.
Let it go.
VirtualBridge7 | 5 hours ago
As if someone worth $1M is all that rich? With constant high inflation $1M is no longer all that much. In most OECD countries $1M would be insufficient to retire on, assuming no other retirement income. Not to mention that most of that wealth is in real estate, which does not bring all that much of income.
moanonyme | 2 hours ago
I mean, why let facts and reason bother your feelings on an economic sub am I right.
Median wealth in France is 200k€
There are multiple definitions of rich in economics if we speak about wealth, but most common definition will be 4x the median
Which brings you to 800k.
And yes mate you can retire on a million bucks. Assuming 3.5% withdrawal raté you can get 35k indefinitely with inflation.
Median annual income is 26k in France.
DeRobyJ | 10 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_millionaires
3.5% of the population in France are dollar millionaires
I think France does have a few people who could help hiring some teachers and making sure rats don't join lectures
Striking_Hospital441 | 10 hours ago
Yes, but what exactly are you taxing from them, their stock of wealth or their flow of income?
If you want it to be a permanent and reliable source of revenue, there is a limit to how much you can raise from the wealthy alone.
blipblapbloopblip | 9 hours ago
That limit is somewhere around 5% of the stock every year or 50% of the flow, considering the wealth of very high net worth individuals expands at a rate higher than 7%
Striking_Hospital441 | 9 hours ago
The idea that you can tax 5% of someone's wealth every year just because their assets happened to grow by 7% is a pretty crude calculation.
Asset appreciation is not the same thing as cash income, and there is no guarantee that wealth will grow by 7% every single year.
Even with simple arithmetic, a 5% annual wealth tax on assets earning 7% is equivalent to taking about 71% of the annual return. And that is before accounting for any existing taxes.
A tax burden that high could seriously discourage investment and capital accumulation. Once you also consider tax incidence, some of that burden could ultimately fall on workers as well.
DeRobyJ | 10 hours ago
There is a limit to how much you can raise from working people too, yet they are the only ones with 50% of their income going to taxes.
If a person making 50k a year can fund 25k of public services, a person owning 1 billion should be perfectly able to fund 500m of public services, as they are already doing by investing in bonds
As for the "how", there are many economists who have their recipes, give them a try, without exempting stocks this time.
Striking_Hospital441 | 10 hours ago
You are conflating annual income, which is a flow, with accumulated wealth, which is a stock.
You can tax people by forcing them to draw down their assets, but that does not make it a permanent source of revenue. Simply transferring ownership of capital does not create additional goods or resources.
Buying government bonds is also completely different from paying taxes. A bond purchase is an exchange of assets. Taxation is a transfer to the government without receiving an equivalent financial asset in return.
There is also the issue of tax incidence. Taxes on capital can ultimately affect workers through lower investment, reduced capital accumulation, or capital flight.
In practice, even the Nordic welfare states are not financed simply by taxing the wealth of the rich. They rely on broad tax bases that include substantial taxation of the middle class as well.
BeltMountain5596 | 9 hours ago
There's no point arguing with him, they always think there is another pot of gold at the end of some rainbow that they can tax, the fact is no one in their right mind would invest or hire in France. Luxuries, perfume and wine and airbus are the only high moat exports they have, everything else they do is subject to ruthless global market competition and it's clear they can't compete well enough to grow. So when a bond crises forces the government into arrears on salaries and expenses, they will be forced by economic reality to change. Until then, they won't do a thing.
DeRobyJ | 9 hours ago
>You are conflating annual income, which is a flow, with accumulated wealth, which is a stock.
[...]
Buying government bonds is also completely different from paying taxes. A bond purchase is an exchange of assets. Taxation is a transfer to the government without receiving an equivalent financial asset in return.
Sorry if I gave you that impression, but I am indeed saying that many billionaires do have quite a bit of their money as bonds to governments, so our governments are already operating with money "taken" from billionaires, demonstrating that we do need that money to operate.
The arrangement changes, ofc, but governments are using billionaires' money already.
> Simply transferring ownership of capital does not create additional goods or resources.
Except it does because the owners of an asset will decide what to do with it. Right now big owners invest in AI, spaceships, Israeli tech and luxury real estate. If capital was instead in the hands of welfare cooperatives, you'd see more social housing, which in turn would allow workers to join productive companies in city centers at lower costs, which would generate more goods.
>Taxes on capital can ultimately affect workers through lower investment, reduced capital accumulation, or capital flight.
That is true for all taxes. Taxes on income will force working people to drastically reduce their spending, slowing down the real economy. However, money in the hands of working people is more likely to be spent in goods and services, while money in the hands of rich asset owners simply buys more assets, rising homes prices too.
>In practice, even the Nordic welfare states are not financed simply by taxing the wealth of the rich. They rely on broad tax bases that include substantial taxation of the middle class as well.
The Nordic welfare state is also possible because they did not sell away their assets. Norway has ownership of their oil production, creating a national sovreign fund. Many cities in Sweden, like the one I lived in, have housing companies under public control that build and do research for the people rather than maximizing profits, this way rents are very low.
Striking_Hospital441 | 8 hours ago
First of all, government bonds are not primarily held by wealthy individuals. Major holders include central banks, financial institutions, pension funds, and foreign investors.
And buying government bonds is completely different from paying taxes. Buying a bond means lending money to the government. The government has an obligation to repay the principal and interest, so bond financing cannot simply be treated as another form of taxing the wealthy.
The same issue applies to redistribution of capital. Simply transferring ownership does not create any new goods or services. There is also no guarantee that public investment will allocate capital more efficiently than private investment. It can just as easily result in inefficient allocation of resources.
Housing is another example. The key issue seems to be land use regulation rather than whether capital is publicly or privately owned.
Tokyo has continued to add large amounts of privately built housing as its population has grown, under a relatively flexible zoning system. Paris, by contrast, has much tighter building regulations and height restrictions that constrain housing supply. There is no reason housing
imbrickedup_ | 9 hours ago
So you incentivize not investing in the country
DeRobyJ | 9 hours ago
Remind me the current growth rates of these countries that have been prioritizing investors for the past 30+ years.
Stockholm-Syndrom | 9 hours ago
Taxing people on the stock of wealth already exists, at least in France. We call it property taxes, and it has never been a reason for people to sell their homes en masse.
Striking_Hospital441 | 8 hours ago
According to 2024 statistics, the average annual property tax paid by an individual who owns a single home was only €717.
Even France's real estate wealth tax has a top marginal rate of just 1.5%, and there is also a cap on the total burden relative to income.
At rates like that, I would not expect taxation itself to trigger widespread forced selling.
vovap_vovap | 10 hours ago
3.5% ? dollar millionaires? God that super reach man! If you own good apartment in Paris center you are already "dollar millionaire".
God help us with idiots of all kind.
DeRobyJ | 10 hours ago
If you own a good flat in Paris, chances are you can help fund schools a bit more
You are kinda proving my point.
There ARE people who should help right now
vovap_vovap | 10 hours ago
Go to a Cuba - take a look. Maj be it is not too late to go to Venezuela too. See how good is it when you "make reach people help"
Get some education man, that really helps.
DeRobyJ | 10 hours ago
So basically asking the rich to share a tiny bit of their wealth back to the workers who gave it to them, is going to be like Cuba?
Why? Do you think the US will do an embargo on France as soon as France ditches neoliberalism?
MikeWPhilly | 9 hours ago
Maybe go out and earn something yourself?
DeRobyJ | 9 hours ago
I am indeed a worker making money with my work, yes
If I were a millionaires I'd earn 2000€ a month from bond interests and sit at home all day, unfortunately I'm not so I gotta put my 40 hours in.
vovap_vovap | 9 hours ago
I did told you - get some education, helps in life. It is not a joke.
It is not a "neoliberalism" that idiotism 😄
Sure you going to define who is "rich" and how much that "bit" should be. And in short time you destroy all business there and leaders of that movement took what left by the name of the people and start to manage it - by the name of the people - and everybody would be worse off but they will be better then others and so happy and try to put their children on their place.
That happen so many times - not funny anymore. Yeah, I do believe education level there really get down 😄
DeRobyJ | 9 hours ago
Socialism is when things currently happening under Capitalism happen
MikeWPhilly | 9 hours ago
Why?
MikeWPhilly | 9 hours ago
It’s not like a million is that much.
DeRobyJ | 9 hours ago
Agreed, let's do a progressive tax, 0% until 1 million, then 1% until 10m, and 5% over that.
Deal?
MikeWPhilly | 9 hours ago
Nope. Thank god I don’t live I n France. Well if I did I’d move.
DeRobyJ | 9 hours ago
If you're not interested in a wealth tax, why do you even comment on what is a lot of money ahah
MikeWPhilly | 9 hours ago
France needs to stop eating itself. Just like the USA does at the moment. For example we shoudl Havel et the trump tax cuts expire. Some of the wealth taxes crazies want in the USA would be massively damaging and have the opposite effect unless we are only targeting above $10B
SteveUnicorn99 | 9 hours ago
Wealth taxes are dumb, we need a new tax structure that changes how we invest. We need to close the casino and get back to work as a country.
Rnee45 | 8 hours ago
>"If you don’t want to climb Everest, why do you have an opinion on whether it’s tall?"
Brother, what?
swiebertjee | 10 hours ago
It's not an income problem but a spending problem. Taxing those 3,5% of millionaires won't solve any issue, at best it will delay the inevitable and at worst they leave and France is poorer than it already is
DeRobyJ | 10 hours ago
Wealth can leave, if they sell their wealth to go somewhere else I will root for them
swiebertjee | 9 hours ago
Haha sell their wealth, they'll take it with them, including the jobs that it generates.
I wish france and the left in general good luck with that mentality, they'll need it. It will be worse than Greece. All that just because the French cannot accept that there are too many people relying on benefits and the pension age is too low.
DeRobyJ | 9 hours ago
>jobs that it generates
Wealth does not generate jobs.
Workers generate wealth.
Jobs are "generated" by people having needs or wills and purchasing power. You are free to be a private tutor, but only if there are kids needing private tutors and parents with enough money to pay for that.
Wealth itself only generates jobs if the owner thinks they can gain more than what they spend. So only if there is demand of something and purchasing power behind it.
swiebertjee | 9 hours ago
I'm not going to argue with you about the fundamentals of economics. The French will experience soon enough what it means to have no wealth, and finally "be equal".
jovialfaction | 9 hours ago
It's mostly real estate wealth. Very hard to tax especially when the owners are not very liquid
DeRobyJ | 9 hours ago
That's why most wealth tax proposals are progressive and put a threshold.
Let's do 0% until 1 million, 1% until 10 million, and 5% for all wealth over 10m.
Deal?
Aesma42 | 7 hours ago
We used to have a wealth tax. In fact there is still one on real estate. It brought a few billion euros, while pushing people to leave the country as soon as they started getting succesful, or even before that, as soon as they got their diploma...
DeRobyJ | 7 hours ago
France wealth tax exempted stocks, Zucman is well aware and replied to your concerns many times
CurrencyDesperate286 | 9 hours ago
Good luck extracting much money annually out of someone with a million or two in assets, potentially a fair proportion tied up in primary residence and business or farm.
I’m not opposed to wealth taxes at all, but people really overestimate how much they’ll get from and under-estimate the complexity of not just causing lots of forced sales.
imbrickedup_ | 9 hours ago
They have one of the highest tax burdens in the continent I’m not sure what the protestors think they can do
BrillsonHawk | 8 hours ago
It doesn't matter which taxes go up. If you want to keep living with the same government handouts you need to pay more money. You won't get enough just from the rich to fund your spending
MittenstheGlove | 11 hours ago
Because the rich are apparently above everything.
Swankytiger86 | 11 hours ago
The thing is “the rich” only represents a very small population, probably less than 10k people in the country. They are also those who can leave the country, or change their investment spending oversea rather than domestically easily.
Besides that, taxing them also doesn’t really make much different. Increase 2% on everyone will likely to have much more better effect than Increase 10% tax on the richest 10k. Of course we can do both.
VPackardPersuadedMe | 11 hours ago
UK made mood music around it and lost a payer who regularly paid over a quarter of a billion a year...
Pomodoroo | 10 hours ago
61k households in the highest tax bracket (181k taxable income to get there) 420k in the next bracket (160k for a married couple to get there)
While 22 million household make so little money they are not paying income tax.
Framing a general increase as a fairer way to carry the burden is absurd. And I’m saying that while being in the 3rd highest tax bracket, which puts me in the 10%, if my taxes would go to education, health, social programs I’d be glad to pay more. However it seems our government is hell bent on emptying the coffers to pad the big corps bottom line.
And this doesn’t even address the issue of inherited capital
Swankytiger86 | 10 hours ago
I am not framing it “fairer”, but framing it as more “impactful” in tax collected.
Pomodoroo | 9 hours ago
Having more tax brackets with an agressive top end would provide better compliance and result in more collection. We only have 5 and someone making 200k a year is taxed the same as someone making 20 million. You could lower the bottom end tax rate and yet collect more as a whole
a_library_socialist | 10 hours ago
> They are also those who can leave the country,
They can't take their property with them.
Swankytiger86 | 10 hours ago
Property represents a very small net wealth of the “rich”. Besides that it is non-productive asset. Everyone needs more productive asset. Regardless which country it is, all government needs “companies” that can produce sustainable income & jobs.
Also, Taxing the current wealthiest 10k-100k people aren’t really that hard. The hard part is after that, the next potential wealthiest 100k person will not willing to create their wealth in that particular country anymore just to reduce their risk. That’s the headache part. Each country is also fighting with each other to entice these wealthy people/talented individual to move their tax domicile.
a_library_socialist | 10 hours ago
> all government needs “companies” that can produce sustainable income & jobs
Those companies have locations, and capital, which represents the physical assets required to produce. That is what is property.
> will not willing to create their wealth
Owning things doesn't create wealth.
Arengen | 3 hours ago
french actually know where the spending increased this last decade and would be ok to reduce it.
It's just that the government and online propaganda wants to cut everything in our system except the par that inflated out of control
Alternative-Ice-7534 | 11 hours ago
I think i'm glad you're not a policymaker
palwilliams | 10 hours ago
Not all taxes, taxes on the wealthy
MiddleAgedSponger | 9 hours ago
Why do they have to vote on a false dichotomy? There are other options.
rupert20201 | 11 hours ago
You mean kinda like Brexit in the UK?
Flashmode2 | 7 hours ago
France has some of the highest spending per student in the world. The education system does not have a lack of funding. The real issue is the pension system in France and it will be painful to actually address it. The retirees drawing the pension are making more money than people working. The pensions make up around 25% of education spending alone.
deepserket | 11 hours ago
It's easy to demand spending when you're using someone else's money, especially if you won't be alive when the bills comes.
Compromises will have to be made.
Greedyanda | 11 hours ago
The young are demanding to increase spending just as much.
This is stance across the entire political spectrum and all ages. The only ones in opposition are Macron and his center party and you can see where this gets them on the polls.
France is fundamentally fucked and will need a Greece style wake up call.
Cadoc | 8 hours ago
Yeah, both in the UK and France young people broadly oppose pension reform, not realising they will never benefit from these pensions.
jokikinen | 8 hours ago
Not all the demands are about spending more. You could also frame them as calls to cut spending fairly. Many raise the point that cuts target young people more than they target pensioners.
It’s a fair point to raise.
France needs to find a political option with legitimacy. It means the pain needs to fall fairly within society. Cuts that impact everyone and tax hikes are worth considering too so that everyone really participates. It’s not a dealbreaker that the tax rate is already high—you can still increase it, the French are entitled to do so, and they should if it unlocks a political option that works. E.g. it’s better to have a higher tax rate than to default (adding this context for the people reading the comment that react strongly when tax hikes are mentioned).
poshmarkedbudu | 8 hours ago
The issue for France is just because a political option works now, doesn't mean that it works for their long term sustainability.
a_library_socialist | 10 hours ago
> when you're using someone else's money
Capitalists trying to make this argument will never not be hilarious
ja_dubs | 10 hours ago
I don't like the framing of someone else's money. It is a rhetorical tool to oppose taxes and redistribution. There is, however, a deeper point: the trade off between spending now and investing in the future. The more that is spent on programs for the elderly the less there is to spend on other programs. The less that is spent on debt servicing now means more needs to be spent on debt later.
a_library_socialist | 9 hours ago
Yes, and that's a much better framing, I agree.
Pretending that the government or society is a household checkbook is just stupid.
thegreatshark | 8 hours ago
I don’t understand the hate for this analogy. It’s a much simpler way to explain govt finances to the general public and the analogy functions in most of the regular scenarios that aren’t exceptional emergencies.
Sure a household cannot devalue its currency to inflate away the debt, nor can it unilaterally default, or dramatically increase their incomes through aggressive increases in taxation, but if you’re considering any of those its already a deep crisis. Personally I find that for explaining day to day financing of the government, and especially the need to balance the deficit, the analogy is adequate.
What about the checkbook framing do you find so objectionable?
a_library_socialist | 8 hours ago
In my household we don't issue our own currency, for one thing.
Wide_Lock_Red | an hour ago
Neither does France.
a_library_socialist | an hour ago
Nope, and that's what's going to be very interesting if there is a debt crisis. France isn't Greece, and Germany now isn't Germany in 2008.
thegreatshark | 7 hours ago
Right but that’s literally pedantic in the overwhelming majority of cases. Sure, the government controls its own currency, but can you find any meaningful way for a country to use that to lower their debt burden without doing catastrophic and lasting damage to themselves?
I can’t. I’ve mentioned a couple of the tools countries have with regards to currency and each and every one of those tools come with long term pain that no reasonable politician (who cares about his country’s future) would ever implement.
a_library_socialist | 7 hours ago
Every government has literally been issuing more currency for decades. So unless you think everything since the Nixon Shock has been catastrophic and lasting damage, it's unclear what you mean.
And the other difference is simple - most households don't control their own production. They have income that comes from wages. Few governments get wages from outside sources, they have internal production.
valletta_borrower | 7 hours ago
Aside from what you already mentioned, planning for a country starts with the assumption of perpetual economic productivity and government planners start with all of the assets a country needs to run (because the country already exists, this must generally be true).
A person starts with no assets, takes on debt to rapidly accumulate them, expects to stop earning in the future, and so plans for those debts to be paid off before retirement.
At a certain point it make no sense for a household to invest in its future productivity because the remaining years of economic production are too few whereas a government must continually invest in future productivity because it will continuously need its citizens to be able to generate incomes.
The scale of the agents and the feedback loops are also completely different. A household's impact on the economy it sits within is essentially negligible; if it spends less in the economy, the negative consequences of that will almost certainly not be felt by the household. If a government spends less, the wider economy will notice the lower aggregate demand and it will directly result in lower tax receipts (and possibly increased welfare spending).
A government must act in the interests of a wide range of other competing actors (assuming a democracy), where any individual household is expected to act almost exclusively its own interests.
A government can make policy to encourage or discourage other actors to carry out the aims of the government's economic policy - a household cannot.
They are so fundamentally different that it's hard to see why people try to draw a comparison.
notapoliticalalt | 5 hours ago
Excellent observations. I think one thing that a lot of people mistake is that there can be similarities between different categories of things without them having to “basically be the same“. Obviously there will be some similarities between how a household and the government can think about revenue and spending (and let’s also not forget the oft mentioned mythical business that government supposedly should run more like). And to be honest, if people could separate these things, I don’t think it would be so much of a problem. But I think a lot of people basically expect them to be interchangeable. That is to say that, since both a horse and chair have four legs and are sat upon, they must be the same thing and therefore should act the same. Ultimately, we leave a lot on the table when governments are constrained by the concepts they must be the same as households or businesses.
ja_dubs | 7 hours ago
Because a government raising taxes, cutting programs, or issuing debt is not the same as balancing a checkbook. Governments have fiscal and monetary policy; households do not.
For a household, when there is an economic downturn, it is relatively easy to cut discretionary spending. The same is not true for a government. In fact, governments should consider increasing spending to stimulate the economy. When a household has a surplus, it can spend more on luxury items. A government needs to be concerned with the inflationary effect of spending in a hot economy. Households generally have fixed earnings and cannot easily generate more revenue. Governments can pass legislation to increase tax revenue or they can properly fund the IRS and net 12-14x every dollar spent. Due to budget cuts, it is estimated the US is losing out on $861 billion in revenue over the next decade.
In general, I find the analogy reductive. If balancing the budget were easy, then we should be running net neutral or a surplus every year. By comparing it to a checkbook it makes it appear that cutting spending is the only way to go and that government revenues are fixed.
AK_Panda | 4 hours ago
If my household had access to nearly unlimited, cheap debt. I would go on a massive asset buying spree. I'd be stupid not to. That maximises my revenue which can be used to pay off debt easily. If I acquired so many assets it was problematic economically, I'd pivot to investing in productive infrastructure and the wider economy to grow more.
But people comparing govt finances to households, seem to also advocate doing the exact opposite. They tend to advocate the firesale of assets and slashes revenue streams.
In my country we had a govt come in preaching fiscal responsibility. Their first point of business was borrowing debt to fund tax cuts.
Have you ever looked at a household budget and said "Fuck, I'm in too much debt, better reduce my income quick!"
Wide_Lock_Red | an hour ago
The big costs most governments face is pension spending and elder care, which are not productive assets. The issue I have with Keynsiaj rhetoric is it tends to ignore how governments are actually spending the money.
For France especially, their gdp has barely grown despite massive spending. In their case, the household analogy holds up well.
AK_Panda | an hour ago
Yeah, it's a demographic issue. Pensions work when there's 5-10 workers per pensioner. They get real tenuous when there's 1.5-2 per pensioner.
I've got no idea how that can be resolved. Either the economy collapses, or the elderly find themselves up shits creek. Ain't no other way around it.
Spezalt4 | 10 hours ago
Most intelligent socialist lmao
Rnee45 | 8 hours ago
Not as hilarious as socialism’s resume: tried everywhere, worked nowhere, still applying.
a_library_socialist | 8 hours ago
Sure thing.
**looks at Russian GDP in the 1990s**
Yeah, that "free-market" capitalism sure works wonders!
Rnee45 | 7 hours ago
Ah yes, the 1990s: the decade of recovery right after 70 years of socialism.
Don't think that's the argument you want to be making.
PerformanceThick2232 | 7 hours ago
lol idiot, after commie in power
Fortessio | 11 hours ago
Right! As if the multiple tax cuts that caused a massive budget deficit is not a cause of this mess in the first place
Greedyanda | 11 hours ago
The tax cuts did not cause the current situation. It was brewing long before those were applied. France is already taxing its population at world record approaching rates while outspending China and the Soviet Union on welfare programs as a percentage of GDP.
What's the plan here? Keep increasing taxes and pensions until France becomes the first country in history to spend 100% of GDP on social services? And then what, try to conquer other countries to get more money for spending?
The only way out is to cut spending. You can't outrun wasteful and absurd amounts of spending by increasing your taxes perpetually.
CornerShark | 11 hours ago
You’re on Reddit. The average individual here has no concept of personal responsibility or of consequences for their actions.
France made their bed. Now they have to lay in it. The bond market will ensure that.
Careless-Degree | 9 hours ago
Do communist revolutionaries compromise?
D4zb0g | 11 hours ago
Why not both ? I mean, we had 10 years of government proactively reducing its source of income but there are today easy fix that could provide a starting point, yet they touch on large corporations and retirees, so this will never happen.
Example: not aligning pension on inflation: +7/8bn on the budget, end of the tax deduction for retirees: +5bn. Half of this could already resolve most of the issues in the public education system without any impact on domestic consumption.
fryxharry | 9 hours ago
Finally someone who makes sense. The problem is pensioners sucking the system dry and not leaving enough money for education.
CanAlwaysBeBetter | 7 hours ago
There were riots when France tried to modestly raise the retirement age, seems like they just want everything to be "better" without making an actual changes
SkitariusOfMars | 6 hours ago
The deficit is 17 billion (5%). So yes, smth like that, with 5 year moratorium on indexing pensions on inflations, would go miles towards solving the issues
ImConfidentURWrong | 9 hours ago
As an American, I’m watching what’s happening in France/ Europe with schadenfreude.
Growing up in the 2000s/early 2010s, I heard Europeans constantly criticize the USA as a racist, overly capitalistic, warmongering nation that should just focus on the welfare state instead. When it was (correctly) pointed out Europe could only sustain these massive welfare states because of the geopolitical backing of the USA, and that such disinterest in competing in the global economy/geopolitics would come back to haunt them, Europeans clutched their pearls and insulted you as misinformed.
Fast forward 15 years, Europe is imploding. It’s imploding because it turns out the generous welfare state is the only thing that it had going for itself. It can’t compete economically, militarily, or technologically with the great powers of our time. USA doesn’t want to pay for another European war. China is out competing EU industries. Both are out competing EU on AI. All the European talent and wealth leaves. You’re left with a bunch of aging adults that need to be taken care of, and a society too poor and socially defeated to address the challenges it is facing.
I hope your high taxes and welfare at the expense of a military and good economy were worth it. Looks like the gravy train is crashing to a halt.
✌🏻
Edit: Reddit, you can’t downvote your way out of facing reality.
Lachokrampfo | 4 hours ago
Shouldn't you be happy with how great things are going at home or is Schadenfreude the only kinda joy you can get?
Bitter_Position_1882 | 7 hours ago
I’m French and American (and have a top 1-2% income) the situation in the US compared to France isn’t better for 80% of the population (except if you think maybe they having bigger cars and driving more on highways with more lanes makes one happier).
All the industries (including the one I work in) that are globally competitive in the United States benefit a small silver of the US population (and a lot of them only exists because of immigration that the current admin is hell bent on killing), the rest of the economy is and has always been thinly veiled protectionism masquerading as capitalism.
The 7 biggest Big tech companies that are third of sp500 by now are only employing ~1m employees and supporting tens of millions of retirees that’ll go bankrupt if those companies’ stock go down because they won’t be able to sustain their spending.
Also, France has nuclear weapons, no military threads threats there.
Feisty-Boot5408 | 4 hours ago
You just proved OPs point though. The situation being considered “better for 80% of the population” in France is fueled by a completely unsustainable welfare state. It is drying up, while the US keeps growing. What happens 10 years down the line when France has no money for social services, can’t take on debt, taxes keep dwindling, and it takes down the Euro?
Think the “80% of the population” will still be better as unemployment increases, benefits are cut, and the Euro tumbles? All while France drowns itself in legislation and red tape so growth cannot happen and the economy continues to decline.
Bitter_Position_1882 | 4 hours ago
The United States is running a 6% budget deficit, more than France, and has generally a culture that is completely foreign to being financially responsible. What do you think happens in 10 years when China rises and the US looses the dollar privilege all while its flagship companies are not competitive anymore because they were sustained by immigration which has dried up? Not even going to mention AI which is going to rip through jobs that have a 32-35% federal income tax marginal rate and starve the federal government.
Folks in middle America are going to get hit hard when they’re one paycheck away from loosing everything because their costs are way too high because they had to have a F-150, a 2000sqft/200sqm house that costs a fortune to heat and requires AC and a 25 mile commute to go to their underperforming company where they are paid too much money.
Axl45 | 4 hours ago
Yea right, China rises to where?
Feisty-Boot5408 | 4 hours ago
This discussion is about France, yet you keep trying to apply whataboutisms to the US.
But sure. The US also controls its currency, and has had about 140% real GDP growth in the last 20 years while France has had 22%. So the US has grown 7x as much as France.
The US in the last 20 years went from an economy that was ~6x as large as France to one that is now 10x as large.
Last_Arrival5423 | 4 hours ago
Maybe not for France. But for the rest of Europe there absolutely is a threat. Realistically I don't believe that France would nuke Russia if it invaded the baltics or finland.
Legal-Chocolate8482 | 8 hours ago
What would a better military have done exactly for Europe? Their deficits would be far worse even and the economic collapse would happen even sooner. It’s not like Russia has any ability to actually go to war with Germany or France or whatv regardless and that’s Europe’s only major physical threat. Btw you’re gloating but Americas debt and deficit picture is not all that much better, it’s made worse by our massive defense spending too and our excursions abroad. All that money and we can’t even really win against Iran and run out of ammo in weeks.
Our welfare spending is massive too btw we just spend it extremely inefficiently where a ton of people don’t even get basic medical access despite the massive sums of tax money sucked up. The us spends far more tax money on healthcare per capita than any other nation , despite having shitty health outcomes and a huge uninsured unserved population like its some third world country.
Our ass is mostly only saved for now because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, that’s literally the only reason. The Us is a terrible example for responsible spending lol , just in the last few years the deficit has increased massively, and every president has been far worse than the last. Trumps big beautiful bill has really blown up the budget with its tax cuts on the rich, which was already struggling with all the Covid money printing under Trump 1 and Biden.
ImConfidentURWrong | 8 hours ago
They’d be able to stand up to Russia without worrying what the USA was doing.
Just because Russia doesn’t have the ability to directly wage war against France or Germany doesn’t mean an invasion of Eastern Europe would be something they could ignore.
Normal-Confection185 | 8 hours ago
If Russia occupies Ukraine, they would have an additional 30 million people and directly border Poland. At that time, it will feel much more painful and you will feel a more direct threat.
new_account_wh0_dis | 7 hours ago
If they do not like those 30million will be jumping in line for conscription, shit they are already facing a demographic crisis and if the war end poorly military age men will be in short supply in both Ukraine and Russia. Not to mention theres a chance it will just be endless guerilla warfare. Shit by the time any real recovery of the Russian military to fight a combined Europe putins gonna be in his mid to late 80s.
AK_Panda | 4 hours ago
Demographic cliffs encourage military aggression.
If your population is growing steadily, you will always be more economically and militarily powerful in the future. That makes going to war now less attractive as it comes at the cost of future growth.
If your population is declining, you will never be stronger than now. As such, war now is better than war later.
drunkandhotboy | 9 hours ago
Still a better average quality of life than America, China, or pretty much anywhere else on Earth.
poshmarkedbudu | 8 hours ago
Yes and this won't last if it continues.
ImConfidentURWrong | 9 hours ago
Because you’re paying for it with other peoples sacrifices, effort, and money. And as you can see, it’s coming to an end. What’s your plan when you can’t keep borrowing your way out of paying for everything? You’re still in denial.
monk2019 | 9 hours ago
You are totally right with your point, but even then people keep hammering the "capitalist america bad" trope while people keep jumping the ship. Some people just cant help themselves.
It is so sad to watch this all unfolding as a european (dutch), seeing basically the EU implode on itself because of ever rising bureacracies and governments. Seeing stupid foreign policy, stupid internal policy and other retarded laws just breaking the countries apart is so frustrating.
I agree with your point about the borrowing as well. It is going to cause hyperinflation in the euro
Surf_Solar | 5 hours ago
You should check the finances of your country. Last years have been a clownshow with Trump trying to save USA's way of life with unconstitutional tariffs, complaining about bonds and Fed rates because the gov deficits needs cheap money to continue. The USA has resources, high tech, the dollar and the best military, but thanks god because it's struggling for a decade or more. Low life expectancy, high inequality, low PTO, huge debt, low median wealth, compared to other rich countries, it's only a good country if you're talented or born wealthy.
ImConfidentURWrong | 5 hours ago
“But trumpf!1”
That’s all you people have.
Last_Arrival5423 | 4 hours ago
Literally not true. France has a lower quality of life index rating than the US
A3883 | 2 hours ago
It is really rich coming from someone who has the likes of Trump, Thiel, Karp and Musk controlling their country. Starting pointless wars like in Iran, which you can't even win. Your country is speedrunning fascism and betting on building your AI god for which you don't even have the electrical grid to support it.
The bubble is starting to pop, Pax Americana is over. Without global trade and at least semi-competent leadership that doesn't tariff other countries based on the mood their baby president woke up with the USA will be nothing in 10 years.
Try to enjoy your last moments of being on the top buddy. Best case scenario you guys will get someone sane to save whatever there still is to save of your country.
Misschienn | 36 minutes ago
Jesus Christ you're such a pathetic bitter person
Some European said 15 years ago that the US should start randomly invade other countries and you're still upset about it
Latter-Yam-2115 | 11 hours ago
The French economy has been in a downward spiral for years if not decades
You’ll obviously want more “spending” when it comes from others’ taxes or debt.
The incentives are horribly skewed. Productivity and competitiveness too are falling
factsforreal | 10 hours ago
Definitely decades.
Dapper_Bus5069 | 38 minutes ago
51 years exactly.
Puzzleheaded_Tie6917 | 7 hours ago
This is the logical issue for all social spending. I would like the USA to start a pension fund. Instead of paying it as a Ponzi scheme off current workers, instead take the tax and place in an account invested in the S&P500 index until 55, then 60/40 index and bonds until you retire. At retirement (after 59.5), the state buys the best annuity they can for you. This forces retirement savings and prevents poor investment strategies. It also means there aren’t any promises. You earn it, it’s invested the best we know how, and then you get the best annuity available for your cash. You can’t screw up your retirement, but it’s not based on current workers or taxation.
The issue is the government makes promises, and takes on all the risk. But it’s paid for by current workers. As this continues, the public begin voting more and more overly generous benefits for themselves, while leaving the bill for the future people to pay.
superindianslug | 5 hours ago
The issue with that, and 401Ks is that it ties everyone's retirement to the stock market. That means elected officials are motivated to make the line go up, regardless of whether that makes sense in the economic climate or is good for the country. It's why we have had almost 20 yrs of quantative easing and super low interest rates. Corporate consolidation should mean economies of scale, and higher profits, and the line going up, so the government allows it.
I'm my opinion, tying retirement to the stock market is one of the driving factors that has led us to this moment, where a bunch of billionaires are looting the US government, and supporting far right movements around the world, to loot those governments.
rhino369 | 50 minutes ago
The problem is that social security is already running at pay as you go. Your system would be better than what we have, but we got to pay for the system we have for another 50-70 years even if we switched now.
MarknStuff | 9 hours ago
Maybe public spending(especially lavish pensions) should be redirected from the old to young and working age people...? After all why paong taxes if majority of the benefit go to old people who are already asset rich and spent like crazy decades ago?
Normal-Confection185 | 8 hours ago
These protests in France only make things harder for them. Rampage and riot even more. I wish Melanchon the best of luck in becoming president. No matter how much you rampage and destroy, you will only end up suffering more.
terriblethx | an hour ago
Genuinely what is the path here? 1. Means testing pensions = riots, 2. Raising retirement age = riots, 3. Printing money = can't, only ECB can authorize. At least the US has the petrodollar, 4. Taxing wealthy = Ok, but is it enough to cover it all? Is there diminishing returns with capital flight? Wasn't ISF repealed for this reason?
With the structural gridlock that exists in that country, we're just waiting for their borrowing costs to blow up. But even then, what's the rescue plan? The ESM? How's that going to work for the 2nd largest shareholder turning from contributor to borrower? Credit rating for ESM will blow up, too. And there's not enough in there to save France so other countries like Germany will get capital called. Seems like there's 0 good outcome.
kloakndaggers | 33 minutes ago
there is no good answer just like there is really no good answer to the birth rate issue in Asian countries without immigration.
thehourglasses | 9 minutes ago
Hey look, we’re uncovering the endless contradictions of capitalism once again!
BadFurDay | 11 hours ago
Protesters demand an end to Macron's ten years of tax cuts to the rich so that the money gifted to them can be returned to the institutions from which it was taken.
We should not see poverty at highest level in decades and hunger on the rise in a global north country.
In the meantime, the wealth of our billionaires has doubled in the past 10 years.
Our demands are legitimate. The money is already there.
Greedyanda | 11 hours ago
France is already outspending pretty much every other country in the world for social services.
VPackardPersuadedMe | 11 hours ago
Don't ruin their make believe with reality..
Medium-Jury-2505 | 10 hours ago
Cool dude.
The US citizens spend twice as more in average in health insurance than France.
Only for France to have free heatlcare for all
2024 data :
France GDP per capita : 62 525 USD Health spending per capita : 737 USD ~ 1.17 %
USA : GDP per captita : 86 117 USD Health spending per capita : 14 775 USD ~ 17.15%
"On average, other large, wealthy countries spend about half as much per person on health as the U.S."
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/#PIB%20par%20habitant%20et%20d%C3%A9penses%20de%20consommation%20de%20sant%C3%A9%20par%20habitant,%20en%20dollars%20am%C3%A9ricains,%202024%20(prix%20courants%20et%20ajust%C3%A9s%20en%20parit%C3%A9%20de%20pouvoir%20d'achat)
Unlike all the Russian bots that have been learning about economics in recent weeks.
We're doing just as well as the other Western European countries.
framvaren | 9 hours ago
You didn't answer the guys remark, which was valid. France is spending more than you are earning. The country of course has great potential, but if you cannot make difficult choices like not retiring at 62, then markets stop believing you will repay debts.
I'm in Scandinavia and have no problem defending that you have welfare state. But burning cars isn't going to fix your deficit. And compared to other European countries there are plenty of low hanging fruits to get there.
Greedyanda | 10 hours ago
Lovely fact but the US' inefficient healthcare system has no relevance here. If anything, it proves my point. If a country is outspending every single other OECD member on social programs and has some of the highest tax rates in the world, the required action is to reduce spending and re-examine how much money is going where, not increase it. This applies both to the US healthcare system and France' overall social spending.
> Unlike all the Russian bots that have been learning about economics in recent weeks.
Maybe you should join them in learning about economics because you clearly haven't grasped the basics yet. Blaming everything on Russian bots when people don't support your blatantly nonsensical statements is very on par with what we are seeing in France right now. Keep blaming others and avoiding the consequences of your own actions and vote. When the policies you supported as a population go massively wrong, the reasonable action is to question your original beliefs and take responsibility. Not to burn down the city and blame others. That's how democracy works. You get the freedom do decide at the cost of being responsible for the results. By not doing so, you are running either directly into an eventual collapse or into the waiting arms of extremists. Either one leading to the degradation of the democratic system.
Just one more welfare project, bro. Just one more tax increase, bro. This time, it will surely fix your problems. First country to reach 100% of GDP spent on social programs, lets go!
CharmingAd3549 | 8 hours ago
We make way more money in the US. My wife and I are two random musicians you’ve never heard of and we make enough to be in the top 1% of household income in France.
Greedyanda | 6 hours ago
That's a bit of a pointless comparison because you need to adjust for purchasing power.
anormalname63 | 10 hours ago
Was this pro-france, anti-US or what?
Who are these bots downvoting me lol. That guy's comment is out of place and just looks random.
Greedyanda | 10 hours ago
They are a bit confused, give them some space.
DefenestrationPraha | 10 hours ago
Your welfare state spends 33 per cent of the French GDP, which is a lot even for European standards.
If this is not enough for you, nothing ever will.
TheRadishBros | 10 hours ago
The wealth of billionaires is pennies compared to the scale of France’s debt issues. You could tax them out of existence, keep the budget going for a few months, then you’re back in the same issue (except with no billionaires, I guess)
Emergency-Style7392 | 9 hours ago
The wealth of every billionaire in france would be enough to cover spending for 4 months
Savings_Painting1588 | 11 hours ago
What? Even if all money was expropriated from the ultra wealthy in France, it wouldn’t nearly end their debt, nor would it stop the structural problem they have of unsustainable spending.
Appropriate_Eye3906 | 11 hours ago
France reversed those taxes because they were experiencing capital flight and the tax wouldn't raise enough if any money.
princemark | 9 hours ago
Good luck. I’ve been hearing that billionaires should pay more taxes since 2007. Never materializes.
vovap_vovap | 11 hours ago
Protesters is a bunch of damn idiots who are leading country to bankruptcy or fascism (last more probable)
BadFurDay | 10 hours ago
Protesters want to have enough money to eat and live decent lives. Bankruptcy and fascism are things people don't think or care about when they're hungry and see no future for themselves as the social contract is visibly weakening over time.
Don't blame them, blame Macron for creating the material conditions in the population that led to this. As MLK said, riots are the language of the unheard, and the government is too busy salting the wounds to try and engage a dialogue.
Macron is the one leading the country to bankruptcy, he's been in charge of our finances for 10 years and has mismanaged them beyond belief, the protesters have nothing to do with that.
Refusing to address people's material conditions issues is what's leading the country to fascism, surely you should be able to understand that after seeing Trump using the "price of eggs" bullshit to turn the tide and get reelected.
2025, Poverty and inequality in France reach highest levels in 30 years.
Study shows extreme poverty and homelessness on the rise in France.
Careless-Degree | 9 hours ago
I mean opening the borders up to a large amount of people who have no money, jobs, or skills will greatly increase inequality unless you are just handing bags of money out at the border.
vovap_vovap | 10 hours ago
Lets skip BS. Nobody hungry there, we both know that perfectly well. They all eat and 3 times a day mostly 😄
Macron is best centrists president France has for years. He is centrists, not ultra left not ultra right. French people simply work less then anybody in Europe - do you understand that?
BadFurDay | 10 hours ago
From the state itself, 16% french people have to sacrifice meals due to food insecurity, and the number is on the rise. This is not normal in a developed country.
Macron is a "centrist" who only has right wing ministers in his government, and votes laws with the far right. How convenient is that.
Average hours worked by country in Europe, Eurostat. France is in the average.
MikeWPhilly | 9 hours ago
If all the wealth was confiscated you still don’t have enough. So how is that a solution ?
vovap_vovap | 9 hours ago
Yeah, I know. In US like 14%, sure. I been myself in that %, you know? That program of agriculture department to help farmers. I told you - lets skip BS. That bored.
bobandgeorge | 9 hours ago
Amazing. "I personally have been hungry. Nobody else is hungry though."
vovap_vovap | 9 hours ago
I was not hungry, I been and that statistics man. An know many other people as such.
dirtylilscot | 11 hours ago
This whole just raise taxes on the wealthy argument is so juvenile and stupid tbh. I see this shit in California with the billionaires tax. The issues are out of control spending, lack of accountability/auditing of spent funds, and borderline corruption with how contracts are handed out etc.
Why should we trust our incompetent leaders to fix problems by giving them more money to waste through raising taxes? It won’t solve shit.
BadFurDay | 11 hours ago
The demand is not to raise taxes on the wealthy, it's to restore the wealth taxes removed by Macron and get rid of the tax credits he created for the wealthy.
The cour des comptes (french institution in charge of national accounting) estimated 62 billion € a year have been lost that way, by comparing the 2023 budget to the 2018 budget (Macron was elected in 2017).
Two things can be done at once. Wanting to fix the deeper running issues isn't prevented by not wanting to become an oligarchic country. The demonstrations are only related to the second part.
Ish_Joker | 10 hours ago
You make it sounds like those tax reforms had no benefits to the French economy at all and that reverting them would simply bring 62 billion a year as revenue without any negative consequences. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but thinking that restoring the pre-2018 taxes gives 62 billion a year without downsides is a little naive.
AK_Panda | 2 hours ago
At 62 billion a year, funded exclusively with debt, how long would expect before seeing economic benefits associated?
Because it sure looks like it hasn't done much economically for France so far.
Raichu4u | 8 hours ago
I was actually looking into this last night and I will say that the tax cuts on the wealthy have not really had a positive effect yet if one was theorized to happen. Tax exile slowed, but honestly at a small rate. Private investment due to the tax cuts have not meaningfully increased in relation to the tax cuts, and wages haven't meaningfully raised after the reforms as well. The one thing that has increased though is dividend payouts to shareholders.
I'm for dunking on France for having stupid tax systems, but after 8 years of tax cuts, one should look at the data and realize that the recent tax cuts haven't provided the benefits that were originally argued for.
Aesma42 | 3 hours ago
Unemployment went down.
kisstherainzz | 9 hours ago
You do realize that this wealth tax in France was studied that it actually led to a net tax deficiency compared to before it was introduced?
Capital flight happened, diminishing growth. Not to mention the headache of the administrative costs.
Returning it might help temporarily in terms of budget relief but in the long-run, it's a damaging policy.
CharmingAd3549 | 8 hours ago
None of these people can think of a second order effect.
AK_Panda | 3 hours ago
In theory that makes sense. In practice, I'm uncertain.
Macron got in 2017, total tax take then was €365B. Total tax take in 2024 was €370B (that's as far forward as the OECD data goes).
Cumulative inflation over that time was ~18%. So in 2017 terms, the 2024 revenue was ~€303B, 16.9% down.
French GDP growth was ~8% over that period. Doesn't look like much of that is following on into tax revenues at all.
Frances deficit in 2024 was €170B. So the tax cuts are wholely funded by debt. As that grows, so do the costs of servicing it and the opportunity costs mount.
By this point, the cuts to taxes will amount to hundreds of billions of euros. All accruing interest annually.
Which leads up to my point:
>Capital flight happened, diminishing growth. Not to mention the headache of the administrative costs.
When will the removal of this supposed net tax deficiency start returning benefits to the state in the form of increased tax returns? How many decades is it expected to take to pay the costs?
Because right now the answer appears to pretty obvious:
It never will.
For this to pay off France would need to become Europe's most productive and fastest growing economy for at least a couple decades with absolutely monstrous growth.
That isn't happening.
MikeWPhilly | 9 hours ago
And he reversed them when the rich were leaving France correct?
palwilliams | 10 hours ago
History massively disagrees with you
Thecuckeningends | 9 hours ago
"my rich people told me yall are stupid and juvenile tbh, they also said the spending is the problem and that yall are just irresponsible"
nirachi | 9 hours ago
This is the Crux of the issue, the ultrawealthy need to be taxed away. Their wealth is antithetical to a middle class and democracy.
QuantumRenard | 7 hours ago
France as one the world highest tax pressure. The issue that we spend money irresponsibly and waste a lot of the hard earned money from the citizen.
Instead asking for more, we should be protesting for less. Less waste, less taxes, less pensions, less social benefits, less international help, less state spending, less spending for EU..
MrKorakis | 9 hours ago
Protesters demand targeted spending and the markets require fiscal restraint on the total budget. There is no reason why both can't be met in full or partly at the same time.
doctor_providence | 4 hours ago
I had to scroll this low for a reasonable take. Thank you nonetheless !
getzisch | 4 hours ago
Revolution, brought to you by the bond markets.
Even if the far left wins the presidency next year and attempts to nationalise the economy, without a balanced budget, the bond markets will put a stop to it. Everything runs on debt costs and the bond markets are the king. And the left knows this.
I mean even Trump's futile attempt at Iran spooked the bond markets from THE economy of the world. The French is just an easy picking, with no sovereign currency and extraordinary debt. The bonds will force the French to restrain its pension and welfare state.
Either welfare, debt management or balanced budget. Only two out of three options are available at any time.
redzin | 9 hours ago
The markets don't demand fiscal restraint, they demand fiscal responsibility. Meaning restraint... or, hear me out, increased taxes. You can improve public services without blasting the bond market if you would just for gods sake raise taxes to a level that is able to sustain (or expand) public services.
[OP] laxnut90 | 8 hours ago
France is already one of the highest taxed countries in the world.
AtraVenator | 7 hours ago
55% income taxes you can f right off with any raise buddy. Perhaps boot the Moroccans back to Africa?
stargazy-pi | 7 hours ago
Lol seeing a thread about immigration policies in Japan vs Europe is hilarious.
Yt only cares when it affects them
Nepalus | 3 hours ago
Shit costs money, and when you have a giant population of retired pensioners and increasingly smaller generations proceeding them, this creates a problem.
Dizzy_Shake1722 | 7 hours ago
You guys are being silly on purpose. CORPORATE taxes before 1986 was like 50% and now they are half of that. Seems like the government gave up that income to pay for social programs for ultimately no good reason
Speedstick2 | 3 hours ago
And those companies would be competitive globally if they were paying 50% tax while their competitors from other countries pay half that?
Dizzy_Shake1722 | an hour ago
Yes. Taxes are on profit and right now the great majority of that money goes to shareholders and stock buy backs not actually investing in the company itself: https://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/banques-finance/industrie-financiere/actionnaires-le-cac-40-a-distribue-98-milliards-d-euros-en-2024-1015599.html
Almost 100 billion euros to shareholders 2024 ... I'm sure the French people would have use for that money instead
Your beliefs are predicated on myths and propaganda to separate you and from your own money and accept a reduction in your quality of life.
O_945 | 8 hours ago
The issue is that the money isn't comming from the right pockets AND going into the wrong ones as well.
redzin | 7 hours ago
Taxes in the good old days was like 90% on high incomes. Bring back sustainable tax rates.
Failed_Launch | 7 hours ago
Spoken like a true fool
Speedstick2 | 3 hours ago
Show a single individual who paid those tax rates. That 90% is for the USA, when did France have a 90% rate?
redzin | 2 hours ago
Why do I have to show anything? You go ahead and try to show that low tax rates work. The US has incredibly low taxes and their society is practically crumbling. In Europe, austerity and restraint has governed since the 80s where the decline began. Keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different results....
EmergencySubject4368 | 8 hours ago
You can raise taxes up to a point until you start strangling economic development
Latro_in_theMist | 7 hours ago
Boy howdy it would be, like, so crazy if somehow we had a historical precedent for tax and spend policy. Like, if there were a whole economic suite of policies named after one guy which spurred 3% economic growth for 40 years in the U.S.A... Like, wouldn't that be sooooo crazy?
EmergencySubject4368 | 6 hours ago
Keynesianism in countries with such a massive trade deficit like France means raising debt to subsidize foreign economies
Latro_in_theMist | 6 hours ago
You're confusing and/or conflating trade deficit with fiscal deficit and assuming spending would be funded by debt instead of taxation.
Natural_Jello_6050 | 6 hours ago
Holy fuck- more taxes? In France? Hahaha.
55% on “rich” not enough?
How much, then?
VegetableNeck4430 | 8 hours ago
Which taxes do you want to raise specifically, how much do you expect to make with these raised taxes, and to what extent is that going to cover the exploding demand for public services in France’s rapidly aging society?
FlappyBored | 8 hours ago
Macron cut a lot of wealth taxes when he entered office.
It’s why it was hilarious seeing ‘left wing’ Americans laude him for so long when he’s despised by the left in France and Europe for being in the pocket of the rich.
They also spend tons of money on corporate subsidies and they are well known for that in Europe despite it being against EU rules which pisses off other EU nations.
RoamingThomist | 6 hours ago
They generated basically nothing; the reason they were abolished was that the revenue generated was minimal and the macroeconomic effects were overall negative.
The problem is that France already has incredibly high tax rates across the board by European standards. France has run out of runway and is quickly approaching a sovereign debt crisis. Which in an economy the size of France will not be pretty for France (or the rest of Europe, including us across the channel)
HarmfuIThoughts | an hour ago
I asked AI to give me a summary on this. Evidence of economic benefit is mixed, and there was a 4.5billion revenue loss. GDP/person employed doesn't show any obvious benefit https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.GDP.PCAP.EM.KD?locations=FR
Competitive-Hair7499 | 8 hours ago
France's left has nothing to do with "Europe".
FlappyBored | 7 hours ago
In Europe people don’t like Macron either.
The only people who liked him or seemed to worship him were ignorant Americans who thought he was some left wing messiah for some reason.
Reddit was full of constant glaze for him from Americans meanwhile Europeans and French people never understood it.
Competitive-Hair7499 | 7 hours ago
Yeah, I don't agree with that at all. And left wing messiah? Never heard that accusation either.
Macron was just the least crappy option from a country no one has high political expectations for.
Jealous_Bowler3093 | 7 hours ago
Well I'm from Europe and like Macron, as do many others I talk to.
ohhhbooyy | 5 hours ago
This why I can’t take anyone seriously when they think just raising taxes on the rich will solve the problem. France is already known for high taxes, if anything high taxes is what caused slow growth for the country which ultimately lead to less tax revenue as time went on.
Just raising taxes is such a short term idea. You might get more revenue for a year or two but from there your tax revenues start to stagnate or even dip.
doctor_providence | 4 hours ago
Corporate tax was around 33%, and was lowered to 25. Wealth tax has been cut out completely. And the government wonders why there's no money ... So yeah, you could just go back to the previous tax rates, and there would be money.
Oh, those tax cut were made to push employment, which they didn't.
You know what raised instead ? Dividends. So yes, we could raise taxes.
Speedstick2 | 3 hours ago
But you would still be running a deficit.
CautiousOptimism09 | 8 hours ago
Ive got an idea, wealth tax on something like 8 figure estates. Done
garlic_bananas | 6 hours ago
I implore you and every other dimwit that thinks this is a solution to actually run the numbers and see what that would buy.
CautiousOptimism09 | 6 hours ago
Its somewhere in the neighborhood of an increase of about 40 billion, which aint a ton. Idk what the answer is but I can tell you its jot more neoliberalism in the form of austerity and belt tightening for the working class. If it was Macron would be mor popular as thats what France has been doing for the last 30 years. I would also implore you to look at the west and tell me exactly where tax cuts for the rich amd deregulation is making peoples lives meaningfully better
garlic_bananas | 5 hours ago
I am not advocating for any of that though. It's just that a one time capture of 40 billion euros does... Absolutely nothing.. it's so disconcerting that that is the most the average voter is capable of thinking of.
Amadon29 | 7 hours ago
France already has insanely high taxes. They're not like the US.
taufcri | 7 hours ago
Les marcje fin1nciers ils reclament mais va va pour eux ils gagnent bien leur vie depuis macron jai vu que lecornu et letat etait inquiet de proteger 2 ou 3 boutiques de luxes dans paris moi je suis plus ecoeure pour la fleuriste ou le petit bar du coin
fct1ous | 43 minutes ago
Genuine question: could French leaders meaningfully reduce the burden of existing pensioners even if they wanted to? In the US, states are legally obligated to fulfill existing debts as promised and cannot declare bankruptcy - their only choice is to cut benefits for younger, new government employees (which many states have already done) and wait for retirees to die off. So here at least it's a long slow journey to a balanced budget where pension obligations no longer weigh as heavily as they do now. Not sure if France is in the same boat or it's just a matter of political will to rip the band aid off.
Kurichan77 | 9 hours ago
Today, In “Capitalism is Broke,” we take a look at a sticky set of deep, historical contradictions in France that have become very ripe indeed and which offer a preview of what’s coming to your country.
hingeOfHistory | 8 hours ago
all the fiscal restraint fuckers are rich. Coincidence much? If you can afford all the inflation then it doesnt bother you. Heck, you might even call for austerity. Fuck austerity policy that only benefits the rich.
AngelousSix66 | 9 hours ago
Maybe, just maybe, instead of looting the poor shops on the streets, the rioters should loot the billionaire homes? Expecting the government tax the rich? Why not just do it yourselves? Rob a bank, don't rob the convenience store! They aren't gonna be able stop everyone!
Expecting the authorities to do something has been the bane of European existence. Stop expecting, act now and loot from the right people. Just like Robinhood!
SkitariusOfMars | 6 hours ago
The rich are not the problem in an economy where 57% of GDP gets redistributed by state
brigand96 | 9 hours ago
This sub shows the absolute bankruptcy of modern economics: the automatic answer is always more austerity, never cutting military spending, the building of new aircraft carriers.. Bringing back the ISF is always out of the question.
[OP] laxnut90 | 9 hours ago
French military spending is already below the NATO requirements.
The real problem with France's budget is their exorbitant pension system.
They have one of the lowest retirement ages in the world and the average pensioner earns more than the average worker.
McOmghall | 8 hours ago
The French were promised that tax cuts and privatization would usher in utopia. It surprisingly didn't, so now the pendulum has swung back. Voting in Macron was stupid, doing it twice even worse.
This is happening everywhere. You don't have demonstrations in the US because you've been conditioned to a fuck you got mine mentality. As inequality soars it will only get worse. Redistribution is needed.
O_945 | 7 hours ago
Don't worry the "invisible hand" is gonna come save the situation aaaaaany minute now.
azerty543 | 8 hours ago
The French tax to gdp ratio is already the 2nd highest in the world. They have little room to raise taxes at this point.
Dadsfinest93 | 4 hours ago
When are we gonna understand that macroeconomics work entirely different to microeconomics. Whenever people say that these states need to get their finances under control, they are arguing from a microeconomics perspective, because it sounds intuitive and is what neoliberalism has been arguing for decades. But States don't need to run a budget surplus, in fact there can be no growth without somebody taking up debts. Whenever there is a surplus, there is a deficit on the other side. The state sector in countries like France NEED to make deficits, otherwise the economy will slow down or stop altogether. The only reason, that countries like Germany can afford to have a budget surplus (they did for a few years during Schäuble Era) is because they have an export surplus. But aside from that happening at the expense of countries like France or Italy, literally not every country can run an export surplus or just become more competitive, these are relative concepts. Some can be, but not everybody. So France literally has no choice other than to make more debt and there is nothing wrong with that. As long as it makes debts in Euro, where they have (partly) souverignity of the currency.
[OP] laxnut90 | 4 hours ago
France does not control its own currency, so it can not simply inflate the debt away.
Countries can run deficits for a while, but those deficits need to be such that the country can continue to service its debt.
The crisis in France is due, in part, to bond investors no longer believing France is willing or capable of keeping its debt in check.
If no one is willing to lend you more money, the spending cuts are forced to happen at that point.
Dadsfinest93 | 4 hours ago
It can, as long as the European central bank issues, the institution which is controlled by the member states. You are implying that "printing money" is equivalent to inflation which is not the case.
As long as a country is running a deficit within its own currency and can always service any debt, as it is the issuer of the currency and does not need bond investors or anyone else's capital.
The fact that we use the bonds system, is a political choice, as it is assumed in neoliberal theory that private investors always manage capital better than the state. But like I mentioned, it is only a political choice, not a nature law. You can see this, that Greece only went close to bankruptcy when the ECB refused to buy more Greek bonds, whereas during COVID, during which Greece had even higher debt to GDP ratio, Greece didn't have any issue getting money because it was covered by the ECB.
[OP] laxnut90 | 3 hours ago
What is your alternative to a bond?
Governments that spend more than their income need some way to borrow money by definition.
How would borrowing money work if there is not also a lender on the other side of the transaction?
azerty543 | 4 hours ago
It sounds like you are talking about a trade deficit, which is not the issue here. France has a budget deficit fueled by increasingly expensive debt. This is not required at all.
Dadsfinest93 | 4 hours ago
What I was trying to explain, is that within a closed economy, one of the four sectors needs to run a deficit for the others to be able to have a surplus. The private sector always runs a surplus, as people save up money for bad times, the business sector has stopped running deficit and saves as well. In France's case, they have a trade deficit so the foreign sector is also running a surplus, literally the only sector remaining is the state one. And that's actually an advantage because it is the issuer of its own currency and thus can't run out of money, or at least has more control over it.
AnUnmetPlayer | 2 hours ago
It's a fundamental failure of the EU and mainstream macro. Sectoral balances are given little to no attention. Everyone is supposed to pursue export led growth and/or attract as much FDI as possible. It's a fallacy of composition and makes all these sovereign fiscal 'crises' unsolvable within the mainstream framework.
Not until we relearn that governments earn what they spend, rather than spending what the earn like the rest of us, will anything truly be solved.
Mountain_Snow3613 | an hour ago
I nominate this post for dumbest statement of 2026.
Here's a quick correction on some of your incorrect statements:
1. "in fact there can be no growth without somebody taking up debts."
False. I don't even know how to disprove such a ridiculous statement. Organizations constantly increase their productivity and net profits in ways that don't require external lending. Real growth is literally a measurement of growth excluding debt growth. Your statement is literally so false that we have basic economic terms that describe the opposite process occurring.
2. The state sector in countries like France NEED to make deficits, otherwise the economy will slow down or stop altogether.
Again blatantly false. See Bill Clinton era USA as exemplary proof (a budget surplus- and a trade deficit- yet very consistent real growth). Economic growth is predominantly driven by technological innovation. Spending less govt funds may slow this process but certainly does not stop it.
3. "France literally has no choice other than to make more debt and there is nothing wrong with that."
Again a completely ridiculous claim. France has many choices. They could balance the budget via austerity and lower real growth rates. They could increase taxes in order to balance the budget (many countries did just this during WW2). They could also begin to inflate the debt away (France and Germany did this after WW2). Pretending that France has no options is completely disproven by history.
Odra_dek | 10 hours ago
Or you could - I know completely wild idea - tax the superrich?
Sorrysorry I know, people with hundreds of millions have worked very hard for all of their assets, it's only my personal inadequacy and jealousy that's behind these outrageous suggestions
Kdave21 | 9 hours ago
You could simply take all the shares of the companies the top 0.01% own and transfer it to the government. And it still wouldn't make a dent in the French deficit. The reality is the French have gotten addicted to spending gratuitously on social security, and they're running out of the limit on their credit card. The cost of French debt is now higher than Greece.
This is coming at a time when France wants to divert it's military supply chain away from the US and increase their capability without the US, which will cost billions. There are some hard choices to be made, and some even harder ones to be made if Europe truly wants to invest in its autonomy.