France is the ghost of the future, or the one that tells you what the future will look like if you don't change your ways.
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Don't be surprised if the French left is humming that Beatles' tune: "money can't buy me love. ' What does it take to get the marchers to love France or their history? It's not money, no matter how much you spend. The "students" are not happy no matter how many dollars you spend on the welfare state. Let's check this one from Matt Roberts:
French public sector spending accounts for around 57% of the country’s GDP. Social spending -- that is, cash benefits and in-kind services for old age, health, family, unemployment, incapacity, housing, and so on -- accounts for fully 30% of GDP. This compares to 49.4% and 28% state expenditure and social spending respectively for Germany, 47% and 23% for the UK and 37% and 19.8% for the US. In Communist China, the state accounts for around 33% of GDP and 10-13% is spent on social benefits. In the USSR in 1988, something like 51% of spending was by the state; roughly 15-20% was social spending (these last two are necessarily estimates, because the data are neither easily available nor reliable).
Nor is it true that Macron himself has overseen meaningful cuts to services and benefits. It was part of his persona in 2017 when first elected that he was going to restore sanity to French public spending and make some of the difficult decisions that his predecessors had avoided. In reality, he hasn’t. As the chart shows, in 2017, he inherited public sector spending at 57.5% of GDP, had some initial success in driving it down to a mere 55.3% by 2019, and then indulged in the same kind of massive increases that we saw across the rest of the developed world in 2020.
So the French can't buy love or respect. It's like the spoiled child that lives off of his capitalist dad and then goes out and joins the Communist Party.
We've often heard that France is the ghost of the future, or the one that tells you what the future will look like if you don't change your ways. We in the U.S. need to look at France and see what money spent on government services will get you. It will get you angry people who don't value or respect your sacrifice.
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