The EU Commission is a group of permanent employees who sit in an office and write reports, administer projects and draft legislation. They have no voting rights. They are organised into departments, each headed by a politically appointed Commissioner.
Your country has an identical group of people with a similar role who you also do not vote for, organised in just the same way.
For some reason it's only "undemocratic" when the EU does it, even though literally every country in the world has some kind of permanent establishment of administrators and no country could function without them.
Every country in the world has a "Commission". It's no different to the UK Civil Service or the various US Federal Governments. If it didn't exist then the EU would be unable to implement any of it's policies.
Can you explain how MEP's directly proposing laws would affect this? I really don't get it.
In parliamentary systems it's normal that virtually all legislation originates in the executive. In the British parliament at least, that a law is privately proposed and then becomes law is rare and normally restricted to very simple legislation on specific issues.
The EU doesn't implement any of its policies by itself, ergo it should not require an executive branch of its own. There is no EU army, no EU police. We already have an instance of that in each member state which is required to implement EU laws on its territory, the Council of Ministers coordinates on that afaik.
The general process is a bit like this, simplified:
- the Council of heads of state appoints the Commission
- the Commission proposes laws
- the Parliament approves laws
- the Council of ministers implements them
- the Court blocks any unconstitutional laws
The problem has been for the longest time that the Commission appointments are not elected, somewhat mired in cronyism, and they keep proposing nonsense laws while the elected parliament can just stand there and vote no while not being able to suggest any legislation we actually need.
France has the lowest retirement age of any EU country, the second highest expenditure on social benefits, and a large debt burden.
Raising the retirement age by a couple of years is obviously unpopular, yet arguably sensible - but trying to do that was what caused the last set of violent protests.
If France wants to support Ukraine and rebuild it's army, it will be required to borrow heavily to purchase arms.
If France wants to rebuild manufacturing supply chains domestically, it will be required to borrow heavily to invest in infra.
The above two will be in the tens to hundreds of billions of Euros range.
France ALSO spends tens to hundreds of billions of Euros on social services.
France ALSO needs to pay it's existing interest on debt, which is in the tens of billions of Euros a year and rising.
France needs to cut 2 of the first 3 choices - they cannot cut the 4th one due to EU regulations and if France does not want to become the next Argentina.
Of course it doesn't sound bad but what do you do when you run out of money to pay for it?
Do we decide policies based on what sounds good or what we can actually afford? Because getting paid to do nothing but our hobbies would sound even better.
But hey, if you wanna give boomers luxury retirement while immolating the economic prospects of future generations of workers in order to pay for it, go for it.
> Love it. the previous two parent comments place the cognitive dissonance of Anglo-Saxon economic narratives in stark relief.
For sure, the cognitive dissonance between those who understand basic economics and those who don't. Those who do understand that some of these facts are indicators of a coming crash, and the ones who don't think they're good because they like "free" stuff and don't understand how anything works or gets paid for. We can see where this goes, whether we want to or not, by watching France over the next two decades as it drives the leading edge of the upcoming long-term recession across all large Western economies.
I mean you could just say ‘insert infantilizing Hayekian quip here’ and be done with it. And you don’t know the future any better than anyone else in the planet, so prognosticating that doesn’t serve as reinforcement of your argument.
That might be easy to say to people with office jobs and good pay, but it is absolute dog shit for people with physical jobs who already have overall reduced lifespans.
I do wonder what the French population actually want as a solution to the unsustainable debt and huge proportion of tax revenue(second highest in the EU) spent on social benefits.
Clearly they recognise a need for reform because they vote for politicians who run on a reform platform. Yet as soon as said reformer tries to change anything at all, it's back to the barricades.
From an Anglo-Saxon perspective that's what it looks like, but I think you are missing a cultural difference. In France, the state does not have the legitimacy that it does in the UK and US. In the UK parliament, not the people, is sovereign; this is more or less the practical situation in the US as well, despite lip-service to popular sovereignty.
In France, the people maintain the right to distruptively object to government actions and laws. What seems to us to be a criminal act may have (depending on circumstances) more popular legitimacy than the laws themselves. Or it may not, depending.
France is in trouble because people don't want to face the math. It's going to take a leader to push through changes nobody wants and somehow make them feel good about it. Hard bit.
Also, the USA is in the same spot. Although better as their tax burden is so low, so raising it higher is easier when it comes to the math side of things.
> France is in trouble because people don't want to face the math.
I disagree, a lot of people here are quite aware that we are in very difficult financial situation, from all side of the political spectrum. The main issue is that there is a very big disagreement on how to solve it (i.e how/who to tax more, and where to cut spending). And with a fragmented national assembly, everything is at a deadlock right now.
We don't have issue with the math, we just disagree on what to fund to balance things out.
An example, 200+ billion euros are given yearly to large companies as tax breaks and the like, without the government asking anything in return. The senate had a report about it recently [https://www.publicsenat.fr/actualites/economie/un-cout-annue...].
>An example, 200+ billion euros are given yearly to large companies as tax breaks and the like, without the government asking anything in return.
Man, that must feel like the rug pull of the century for French taxpayers, given that despite these tax breaks, French companies like Airbus and ST are incorporated in the Netherlands and paying(more like, NOT) taxes there instead of France.
I'd be pissed too, and I'd want my money back.
Unless of course the purpose of those tax breaks was actually to keep some jobs in France and not see more of them move to cost efficient places like eastern Europe or north Africa.
Sounds like eliminating the NL's ability to give secret sweetheart deals to major billion dollar corporations that also benefit from tax breaks in other countries, would fix some of these problems.
If you build/design your products here then you use EU's trained labor, EU's infrastructure, EU's legal system, EU's defense, etc. then you should pay your fair share to support these facilities that help you be a billion dollar corporation.
I'm usually against "big governement", and generally against the EU, and more on the side of "laissez-faire".
But I have a hard time understanding how politicians figured that countries with widely varying tax regimes inside an economic union would work out for the countries with a taste for high taxes.
It makes no sense to me. Of course companies are going to choose the most favorable location to incorporate. Counting on companies to be "fair-play" or whatever the politician word-of-the-day is seems completely braindead to me. Unless there were some kind of backroom deals going on, which wouldn't surprise me one bit coming from the EU nomeklatura, and now they're trying to conceal it by blaming "the rich" / "corporate greed".
> It makes no sense to me. Of course companies are going to choose the most favorable location to incorporate. Counting on companies to be "fair-play" or whatever the politician word-of-the-day is seems completely braindead to me. Unless there were some kind of backroom deals going on, which wouldn't surprise me one bit coming from the EU nomeklatura, and now they're trying to conceal it by blaming "the rich" / "corporate greed".
So the issue is more around transfer pricing, which wasn't really a thing until relatively recently. This has a really, really large impact on services, particularly computer enabled services, whereas in a world where most GDP comes from goods it's not really as big a deal (as you can tax the value-add from a factory much easier than you can from a software sales deal).
Unfortunately, the big corporations put a lot of money into finding ways around whatever law you pass, and the EU are not united on this stuff, at all, at all.
> If you build/design your products here then you use EU's trained labor, EU's infrastructure, EU's legal system, EU's defense, etc. then you should pay your fair share to support these facilities that help you be a billion dollar corporation.
What EU country do you live in?
The only way to make this happen is to work really hard on electing national politicians who will do that, and then change the Treaties to make it possible.
The EU does not currently have these powers, maybe it should?
I have not seen any solutions by either the left or the right that mathematically solve it. In fact, the last time I checked, the far right was advocating for a lower retirement age and increased spending.
The left seems to want things we all want, but we're unsure how to afford them. They never seem to have math to back it up as taxes can only go up so much, and they are already some of the highest as a percentage of GDP in the world.
Can you point me to a real proposed solution by either side?
>[Taxes] are already some of the highest as a percentage of GDP in the world.
Is this the right metric: "Tax revenue (% of GDP)"?[0]
If so, France ranks 28 at 23.1% of GDP. The highest non-island developed country is Denmark at 31.4%. Denmark's GDP per capita is 1.5x France. New Zeland's GDP per capita is similar to France and their GDP to tax rate is 29.6% which is the fifth highest. Does New Zeland face similar problems as France? I think I agree with your implication that simply increasing the tax to GDP ratio is not a magic bullet.
In general, the data here is really interesting. Germany and the US have a pretty similar value, both averaging at about 11% in recent years. I would have assumed that Germany would have a higher rate. I wonder if this data is misleading somehow or if my assumptions were just wrong here. I guess one variable missing here is government debt, which is not a tax but is still used to pay for government expenses.
I'm not familiar with the situation of New Zealand with respect to Australia (its neighbours). But the problem in the EU, is that there are a few countries (Ireland and the Netherlands inside the Union, and Switzerland which is right next door and enjoys many advantages and no constraints) which charge way less tax than the "central" EU countries. So companies have a tendency to set up their HQs in those countries.
I'm not one to cheer for absurd taxation (which is a French specialty), but I understand why this setup does ruffle some feathers in France.
> I'm not familiar with the situation of New Zealand with respect to Australia (its neighbours). But the problem in the EU, is that there are a few countries (Ireland and the Netherlands inside the Union, and Switzerland which is right next door and enjoys many advantages and no constraints) which charge way less tax than the "central" EU countries. So companies have a tendency to set up their HQs in those countries.
Speaking as an Irish person, this is definitely true and tax is a big reason for a lot of the multinationals we have here.
However, also note that the Irish people have one the highest debt per capita, basically incurred to pay off debts to EU/UK banks during the financial crisis. If you mutualise debt, and do the capital markets union then you could 100% fix this (but the political will definitely isn't there for that).
The 11% number for Germany (and probably the whole table) is completely wrong. I guess it only shows federal taxes which are about 40% of all taxes including state and municipal taxes. So total taxes are roughly 24% of German GDP.
Ah, I did wonder how state level taxes were being accounted for, seems like the answer is they aren't. I guess I could have looked that up before posting. The values here[0] are markedly different. It shows Germany at 45%, France at 51.53%, US at 29.21% and Denmark at 50%. So I was way off the mark there, although I did think something seemed very off with those numbers. France is the 10th highest in the world, with many of the countries above it being tiny island countries or countries with vast oil reveres relative to their size like Norway and Kuwait. With this being the case, it does seem hard to imagine that more taxes will fix everything.
> In general, the data here is really interesting. Germany and the US have a pretty similar value, both averaging at about 11% in recent years. I would have assumed that Germany would have a higher rate. I wonder if this data is misleading somehow or if my assumptions were just wrong here. I guess one variable missing here is government debt, which is not a tax but is still used to pay for government expenses.
Lots of German spending is devolved to the regions, maybe your figures are missing that?
The transaction cost approach means that the profit motive isn't a barrier either. If anything, you can make money off of solving the problem. That in itself is probably the ultimate proof that communism is wrong, because it turns communism into a self-hating ideology. Imagine being a communist controlling 1/3 of the world and deciding that you would rather see your "empire" crumble rather than convert the last 2/3 through irresistible persuasion/temptation. Not just that, but you literally start a campaign against the idea of doing so. You'd rather doom yourself than admit being a little bit wrong for even more power.
There are plenty of people on every side of the problem. But it takes very few people to paralyze the country. (Even that is relative, it's not like nothing can run during these episodes. But the elected government certainly feels like they can't go forward.)
Just redistribute the resources, cap prices and let the economy prop up itself. The rich have to give it up for sake of stability and greater good. I'm sure they will understand lol
> I do wonder what the French population actually want as a solution to the unsustainable debt and huge proportion of tax revenue(second highest in the EU) spent on social benefits.
Total French private wealth is around $15 trillion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_pri... ), French government spending is around $1.8 trillion/year. Even if the French government were to tax 100% of that wealth, it wouldn't be enough to cover 10 years of spending. Fundamentally the French economy isn't producing enough to support the current level of pension spending, due to a continuously falling ratio of workers to retirees. No amount of taxing anyone could produce enough money to plug that hole.
Fundamentally the French economy isn't producing enough to support the current level of pension spending, due to a continuously falling ratio of workers to retirees.
Do we think this is why French government added so many immigrants in recent times?
Of course an influx of immigrants will cause other issues. But if wealthy people need more population to keep their wealth up, I don't think they care.
It's not about wealthy people alone. You need staff to clean retirees sh!t (literally) in a country where the median age is 42.3 and rising.
France overspent in the 2000s and 2010s due to populist politics, and now the chickens have come to roost. Something needs to give in France, otherwise it'll become an Italy 2.0.
This is simplistic nonsense regularly blurted out by opponents of wealth taxes. It supposes that assets are converted by some alchemy into pallets of cash. The government then piles the pallets up into a big vault and feeds them into a furnace every year until it runs out. And then it's all gone forever.
That's not how things work.
Seriously think through what implementing this would look like. Go through the steps at a high level instead of just adding up 3 numbers and declaring it will never work.
I don't think any government should take over all private wealth. It would be a gross human rights violation and an economic disaster. But this argument against it severely lacks logic and rigor.
10 years of covering 100% of spending? That sounds like a really sweet deal to me, and more than enough to invest into the nation enough to go back to a balanced budget in that time frame.
I mean, try it with yourself. Imagine that you take your current salary, keep it for 10 years, and have 100% of your spending covered? How life changing would that be to you? Probably a lot.
...for 10 years. After that, you're back in the hole that you were in before, but without anything to draw on. They're currently taking in the equivalent of $500 billion but spending $1.8 trillion, with a GDP of $3 trillion.
Understand that the non-wealthy wouldn't get anything new, it would just be a continuance of their current services and benefits. They've have 10 years to increase their GDP by 50% to get the tax revenue to get to a balanced budget. That's simply not happening without obscene inflation, with the corresponding increase in government spending on goods and services, keeping them out of whack.
I would genuinely love to hear more of an explanation from French people about why the French Revolution was considered a success. As best I understand it, the French Revolution of 1789 did succeed in removing the monarchy but devolved into le règne de la terreur where the leaders were guillotining each other and various political enemies for about ten years(?) before Napoleon became the new monarch. Perhaps it can be viewed as a stepping stone in the decades long process to modern France but the short term outcome of the French Revolution seems pretty objectively terrible to me.
I stated this as a matter of course (as in, we'd see broad support for absolute monarchy in France if that wasn't the case), I have no insider information, I'm not even French. It seems I need to clarify "good move".
If your question is "was the Terror awful?", I'm sure you'll have a near totality of french people agreeing with you. If you ask "in retrospect, was the Terror awful enough so that the French nation would have been better off without its Revolution?", then I don't think you'll get many agreement.
The deaths associated with the Terror were plentiful, that's true, but this period was also carefully framed by the bourgeois class who took power afterwards. In terms of deaths, it's around 40k people. The american civil war was 700k deaths. Before Trumpism, would any american say out loud that abolishing slavery wasn't worth it?
I agree that the way I framed the comparison of the american civil war and the french revolution might appear disingenuous because of the omission of the napoleonic wars. It crossed my mind to include it, but because the parent comment was specifically about the Terror and because it doesn't change the core or outcome of the argument, I left it out to avoid the fluff.
I would also be tempted to begin arguing that it might be reasonable to leave out the napoleonic casualties out of the "what good has ever come from getting rid of rich people as a society?" question and I think I could make a case that stands, but I prefer to yield right now :)
I mean, clearly it wasn't an _ideal_ outcome, and at least in theory it could have skipped the Reign of Terror and Napoleon. But also, clearly, after those (and, really, even during Napoleon) it left the average French person in a far, far better place than they would have been under the near-feudalism of the old system.
Very few countries get out from under totalitarianism without significant bloodshed. The US had its revolution and civil war. The UK had a bunch of civil wars. Germany had _both World War 1 and World War 2_ (it didn't take the first time). You could call the Reign of Terror actually comparatively mild; it only killed about 25,000 people, so far fewer than the comparables.
I do wonder if the fall of the Iron Curtain, which is the big glaring _exception to the rule_, revolution-wise, and also the most recent large-scale example, has misled the younger generations on this.
Do you know of a french person who wants to return to the Bourbon rule? me neither. They like that they live within a republic. A revolution was necessary to achieve this. Hence my parent comment.
But the revolution didn't achieve this. The revolution achieved the Terror, and then Napoleon, and then back to the Bourbon monarchy! (I mean, I guess they did at least get constitutional limitations on the monarchy...)
Interestingly, while Denmark has very low wealth inequality, Norway's is only middling, and Sweden's is the highest in Europe, in the same range as the US, Brazil and Russia. The Scandinavian countries have very low _income_ inequality (post-transfers).
Income equality is probably more important than wealth equality in terms of quality of life, but wealth inequality isn't nothing.
(Also you have to be a bit careful with wealth inequality figures, as they can be distorted by local practices; for instance in some countries where defined benefit pensions are standard, such a pension, even though clearly valuable, may not be assessed as wealth, and in some countries it may be common to have a long-term/effectively life right to a fixed-cost rental, which again, is wealth-like, but probably not assessed as wealth.)
You mean the ones who are selling so much oil they put a lot of it in a sovereign wealth fund? Sure.
I think the real question is how to make it work without oil money coming in. Without the constant extra help from foreign countries that money buys. France has some, but not much. Certainly not enough to cover all state expenses and have left over.
The thing is people don't care about how many rich people there are out there, as long as they can get a good life out of their labor (good job, good house, etc) but since capitalism has optimized these out of the reach for most people nowadays, then they start to blame rich people for everything, with the definition of the word 'rich' here being very fluid, ending up to mean just about everyone who has more than they do, and not just your Bezos, Musk and Saudi kings, so any taxes on the "rich" ends up only on the hard working middle class again.
Many french people, like in most other places, don't give a shit who gets cut or increased as long as it's not them. These people will try and paralyze the country because it's effective and the elected government will reliably back off from whatever was objectionable. Sarkozy, a long time ago, ran for president specifically against that, proposing that the country run that gauntlet once and for all. To solve that problem. He was elected on that platform - so it's not like there isn't support for it. Then he backed off like everyone else.
The population isn't homogeneous. The fundamental problem is that the average age of the population keeps increasing, meaning fewer and fewer working people per retiree. This means young people's quality of living gets worse and worse as they have to support more and more non-working people via pensions. Given the opposition to mass immigration, there doesn't seem to be any feasible solution in the near future.
Well, you will never make 65 million people agree with each other.
> Clearly they recognise a need for reform because they vote for politicians who run on a reform platform.
Meh. Macron, and his party, was not really running on a reform platform. He was the typical, business centrist candidate.
And the national assembly is very divided right now, and the government is systematically from a minority party (so neither from the left union, or the extreme right RN), which are not running on a reform platform (quite the opposite).
There is proposition about reforming taxes to taxes the wealthiest, something with some popular support, but no party that support this kind of reform as the power to make it happen right now.
We are in a deadlock since the dissolution of the national assembly by Macron, and we probably will be until the next presidential election, or a new dissolution that would give a big majority to one party which would pretty much ensure them control of the government.
The french system is really not made for a fragmented assembly. This is not what you can find in more parliamentary system where coalition form the government. A fragmented national assembly is basically a deadlock in France's fifth republic system.
Why? What exactly makes it possible or impossible to have a coalition government, in your opinion?
A naive look tells me if a majority can agree to support a government then it can work, and it not not. What "system setup" helps or hinders a majority made up of different parties? To me it seems the important part is the willingness of parties to compromise. Which may or may not be there regardless of the "system setup".
> Why? What exactly makes it possible or impossible to have a coalition government, in your opinion?
Mostly because it is a different system. The parlement in France doesn't elect the government. The president choose the prime minister, and the prime minister form the government.
The parlement can, at basically any point, vote to "censor" the government, effectively terminating it if a majority is reached (they do stay in position until a new government is formed, but can only take care of the "affaire courante", i.e simple daily affairs, no big laws, reforms, policy changes, ...).
Indirectly, this means that the parlement can have a lot of power over who will be in the government. If one party has an absolute, or almost absolute, majority in the parlement, it more or less mean that they can decide who shall be in the government.
Due to the way our election works, the party of the president usually has the majority in the parlement. This is even more true since Chirac changed the duration of the presidential mandate to match the duration of the parlement mandate (and their elections are very close).
This usually give a lot of power to the president, effectively making him the sole judge of who shall be in the government (since he choose the prime minister and the parlement member of his party follow his lead).
But what we have right now is a very unique situation. Nobody has even close to an absolute majority in the parlement. The left "union" (which is not really united, but that's another story) control roughly ~33% of the seat, the extreme right party control ~21% of the seats, the presidential party control ~15%, and the rest are various centrist and right wing party.
The issue is that there is no way to get a solid absolute majority with this assembly. For the left, even if they were to compromise heavily and add as much center-right as possible in their coalition, it would barely give them a majority, and the government would have to compromise so much, it would piss off all their voters, which would be a political suicide for the next presidential election. Nobody want to ally with the extreme right except a few members of some right party, which would never give a majority (and the RN would only go to the government if they don't have to make any important compromise, for the same reason). So, you have to remove the two biggest block. And so, even if all the other party would somehow make a coalition (which is more or less the government we had since the assembly dissolution), it would still give less than ~45% of seats in the parlement, not enough to ensure that your governement would not be censored (which is what is happening, we've had like 3 or 5 government since the dissolution, i can't even remember all of them).
This is an unprecedented situation in France and basically the achilles heel of the fifth republic. Our system cannot function without a clear majority in the national assembly, and the way the assembly is divided right now makes any majority coalition impossible (or a political suicide).
> Nobody has even close to an absolute majority in the parlement.
If the parliament would elect the government, the situation would be exactly as problematic as it is now. I don't see how the fact that the president chooses the prime-minister has any impact on the stability of the system.
You have pointed out a lot of true things, but none of them seems to be a your-system-specific-cause of the current instability.
I don't understand how a 30-30-30 split would work any better if parliament elected the government instead of the president. They would still be unable to reach any agreement, including an agreement on who to put in the government.
A lot of people complain about American FPTP system. But it seems that the French system, with a final round of top 2 in case no one gets clear majority, isn't any better. I am also familiar with the Indian system which gives rise to coalition politics which has its own problems.
The French system is a bit weird, but I think that parliamentary systems with proportional representation tend to work better, as they represent minority interests and basically force compromise, which is good for societal health (but on the downside, ensures that basically nothing controversial ever happens).
There are actually several French people and if one of them votes for austerity while the other protests it that doesn't actually make both of them hypocrites.
The alternative is going bankrupt, thus leading to forced and callous austerity by the IMF and ECB - just like what Greece faced. That would solve the problem as well, but French voters would have no say or autonomy.
French voters need to get it in their head that they need to accept their government tightening belts, otherwise they will have no say on what gets cut.
Unlike in the US, French top 1% are usually families that span dozens of households that run unrelated businesses. The staple of the French top 1% is the Mulliez family that counts >1000 members. The most prominent family members run Decathlon, Auchan and Leroy-Merlin, others handle equally important land and B2B businesses, the offspring get juicy jobs at McKinsey or spawn startups in what's the hot thing of the moment. I am sure there are a few you Mulliez running AI startups right now.
It's really impossible to say what's the effective tax rate of these people. Their real wealth is not in the money, of with they have plenty, but rather in endless opportunities.
The effective tax rates on high income individuals is likely much less. There is a large correlation between income and wealth, and wealth increase through asset appreciation is largely not taxed, or at best taxed at much more favorable rates than general income tax.
Tax on income is not the problem, it's tax on wealth gained through asset value increase.
That is why you have capital gains, which is ~30% in France.
Investment income is flat taxed.
And inheritance taxes, which are very high in France.
If you want to increase taxes, consider taxing income more and capital gains at a progressive rate. Although I haven't seen good data on effects of say a 70% capital gain tax, might hurt th,e economy. I did some reading on this subject last month and the sweetspot was around 20% to 35% on that classification of income.
Do you want to take people's wealth and cap it? IE, nobody is allowed more than $5 million? What are you advocating for instead?
First, wealth tax doesn't work because it requires a ton of work to decide what constitutes "wealth," and then you have to carve out so much crap. The only wealth tax that currently works well is on real estate, as it doesn't move, and the state already taxes that.
For example, how do you tax a private business? In Spain, for example, it is a big carve-out, which leads to people never selling a company, which hurts their economy as you have tons of zombie companies. Or what people do is they take their money and buy apartments and rent them out on Airbnb, wrap them in a business, and get around the wealth tax.
The most effective way to tax wealth is to tax income, capital gains, and inheritance effectively.
But, lets say you can wave a magic wand and tax wealth (France already taxes real estate with a wealth tax + property tax).
What would a 2% yearly wealth tax raise? Maybe 15 to 25 billion a year in France, so it does nothing.
Total French private wealth is around $15 trillion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_pri... ), French government spending is around $1.8 trillion/year. Even if the French government were to expropriate the entirety of private wealth, it wouldn't even be enough to cover 10 years of spending. Fundamentally the French economy isn't producing enough to support the current level of spending, due to a continuously falling ratio of workers to retirees.
> Even if the French government were to expropriate the entirety of private wealth, it wouldn't even be enough to cover 10 years of spending
America's $6.75tn budget [1] would blow through our $140tn private wealth in 21 years. Even Norways $0.11tn budget [2] blows through its $1.6tn of private wealth in 14 years.
Perhaps the better metric is deficit as a fraction of private wealth? If that looks unsustainable, the problem is in publicly-held assets and services.
Somewhat agree, but the problem is that debt is at 110% and taxes are about maxed out. At some point, you go outside the Laffer curve, and then your economic engine is stunted (which maybe France already has?).
How can you tell when taxes are about maxed out? What's stopping France from increasing its marginal tax rate or creating a new tax bracket? Is the idea that people will move elsewhere in the EU with lower tax rates?
Every tax system has a point where extracting more means less economic activity. I think that also applies to paperwork and all the hoops you jump through. I wish I knew where it was, I think that is a big debate :)
But at some point, people give up, they don't start businesses, and if they do, they form them in the USA. Or they move nearby, a lot of French people went to Belgium the last time taxes increased a lot.
That makes sense to me, but if we don't know where that point is, how can we say that France has reached it? I'm not trying to suggest France has or has not--I don't know the French economy well enough to have an opinion. I also wonder if "economic activity" alone is worth maximizing for--like certainly more economic activity is better than less, all else equal, but I think we also want to minimize inequality (maybe we want to maximize for median household income or something?).
I don't know, I wonder the same thing. And does that number change based on culture? And what parts? And how many new businesses are starting up in France and adding good jobs?
I know that the French economy isn't doing great. And it would likely slide further if government spending slows down, but I'm unsure of the extent of that impact. But I wonder how much of the problem is the sheer volume of paperwork and numerous taxes that consume hours to complete, monitor, and review when you get audited.
I think the government should optimize for a lot of things (well-being, good health, outdoor, fun, no pollution, etc etc), but ultimately, you need money to pay for those things, and to pay for guns to keep Russia (or someone like them) from invading and taking them.
Yeah, I'll be the first to admit the French system could do away with a lot of paperwork. The amount of hoops I had to jump through to buy a phone or cancel my bank account in 2012 was wild. On the other hand, the French probably say the same thing about the amount of paperwork required to pay your taxes in the US.
Anecdata but several of my colleagues moved to other countries (Poland, Switzerland, US…) specifically citing high taxes as the reason.
The middle class is disproportionately squeezed.
Also one thing to consider is that most comments here talk about income tax. On top of that you need to also count all other taxes.
Let’s say the company pays a US style salary for you, around 300k from that your actual gross salary will be only 200k from which the taxable salary will be 160k. That 160k is what you will be paying the income tax on (around 40k)
This is the real reason salaries are lower here compared to the US even though the cost of employment is similar.
It's mandatory, on the orders of a senior manager who has no background in software development, for all developers in my department to have a Copilot subscription.
I've never used it for anything, and I imagine it's the same for most of my colleagues(we do highly specialised embedded development with in-house custom everything - compiler, standard library, operating system, hardware), and it seems no-one is interested in whether it's used or not.
Consequently Microsoft is being paid $240 a year per person to do nothing whatsoever, which is surely a great business for them.
Yeah they've become a real commercial outfit now. You could see this already during the shortage period, they always prioritised system integrators. I stay away from them now. It was nice while it lasted.
Nodejs itself is, but when you install a node project manually, you type npm install and wait while it downloads the 500 different packages it depends on.
Debian follows the same philosophy as for other more traditional languages and expects that all these dependencies are packaged as individual Debian packages.
Just jumping in to say that this is making me genuinely reconsider adopting a licence/policy that forbids repackaging: the fact that someone can repackage my project, but worse, and still use my project's name? Absolutely not. I do not want the burden that inevitably comes when people complain to me that this or that is missing from a repackage.
I mean, that's just how OSS works. Anyone can fork your thing, do whatever, and call it a day. Going MIT or whatever won't save you either - this repackaging business is basically the entire business model of AWS.
Forking is fine, do whatever, but as soon as you make actual changes to the code then adopt your own name. This is what trademarks are for, it's just that official trademark registration is somewhat inaccessible (eg: cost) for open source projects. Could you imagine trademarking every little project you make just in-case it gets repackaged by someone who tears huge chunks of it out?
As it turns out, trademarks for small open-source projects are effectively worthless (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44883634), so there's effectively no real solution to people appropriating your project's name while repackaging their inferior fork of it.
Alternatives to Couchsurfing.com such as BeWelcome and WarmShowers have been around for many years, decades even and have users counts into 6 figures. They've remained non-corporate but never managed to reach mainstream popularity like Couchsurfing.com did.
What are you hoping to achieve by launching another hospitality sharing site that the other established non-profit sites couldn't?
Couchers Frontend Team Lead here. Aapeli is out for the night so I'm popping in to answer from my POV.
I think the main difference is that we're trying to capture the spirit of what CouchSurfing.com used to be: modern, easy to use, welcoming to newbies and centered on genuine social connection. But we also want to go beyond that. Build for today’s world—with better safety tools, better moderation, and more community-driven features that help people find each other easier.
Couchsurfing was initially about free hospitality and cultural exchange but is now largely driven by monetization. They also haven't really provided many new features to users since going for-profit.
BeWelcome is another alternative that came out of the CouchSurfing community years ago. It has a more ideological focus around democratic decision-making and they are not as newbie friendly, have an older UI, and are a bit slower to adopt new tech.
WarmShowers on the other hand is for a completely different crowd: it's for bike tourers that leave at the crack of dawn and arrive at sunset. They need a shower (hence the name), a place to put their bike, and a bed to sleep on. They'll probably be a bit too tired to socialize. That's very different from the traditional couch surfing platforms where socialization is the focus.
so couchers focus on better UI and new tech? why not join efforts with bewellcome? or are they too "democratic" and not everyone sees new tech and better UI as major improvement?
Part of it is the better UI and new tech, but there's a lot more too.
Just on that point though: there's actually another open-source platform called Trustroots. They initally started as a rewrite of the BeWelcome frontend, but because of politics and such, BW never let them merge those big changes, so they spun off. Trustroots is a cool project but I think they swung too far into the realm of anarchism in their vibe both as a platform (they are very hitchhikey, so their moderation model is extremely hands off) and as a project (they have this things called a "do-ocracy"). We think there needs to be some planning and roadmapping and a healthy mix of dev + non-dev, as well as serious moderation to keep the platform safe.
I guess their advantage is they have Couch in the name? Joking but I'm curious what the answer is here, I think everyone that remembers the Couchsurfing glory days is hoping that they or someone succeeds in bringing them back
Analysed logically the aim of your post was a positive message that pushes back against "doomers", yet somehow it left me more depressed about the utter futility and meaningless of existence than any other comment I've read so far.
There is nothing "doomer" about my comment that they replied to! It's just true (as this person agrees) that everyone has the incentive to build their own nuclear weapons, because they can't trust anyone else to protect them. That's just how it is now. And maybe non-proliferation was always a pipe dream. But I do feel like we could have given it a better go!
But it's also just how it is that the biggest countries already had huge nuclear stockpiles. I'm not convinced that small countries trying to build them also is a huge contributor to that base level of risk. But we've been surviving in that state of the world for about three-quarters of a century now.
It can't be the case that being open-eyed about the current state of things is "doomer", right? I'm not speculating impending future doom, just describing current conditions as I see them.
Your country has an identical group of people with a similar role who you also do not vote for, organised in just the same way.
For some reason it's only "undemocratic" when the EU does it, even though literally every country in the world has some kind of permanent establishment of administrators and no country could function without them.