'block Everything' Protests Sweep Across France, Scores Arrested

It's EU peers.

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.

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 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?

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...].

Another example, the military and defense get a huge increase in budget. schools, hospitals, research, nearly every public service get a budget cut instead [ https://www.force-ouvriere.fr/non-aux-44-milliards-d-economi...].

According to the votes that Le Pen and Melanchon are supposed to get, I would not say "a lot of people".

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).

  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.

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.

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.

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.

Still, my sense is that there won't be any safe havens. It will be global, it will be stocks, everyone will be poorer so real estate will be unsellable, inflation destroying cash holdings…

Serious question (I am no scholar on history), where were the safe harbors during the Great Depression?

My ignorant notion is that there were none. But if you held on to your stocks for a couple decades, you did fine … just not during those two decades though.

What do you mean? In the French protests, the "evil rich people" hypothesis is very present. Every other protester was brandishing "tax the rich" placards.

An interesting factoid from the Roman Empire is that in their later years there was a major fertility collapse to the point that various laws were passed in order to try to motivate fertility in various ways, and they ultimately failed.

I don't know what to take from that yet, if anything, but I think it's obvious that we've similarly entered well into an 'end of empire' type era, and fertility rates have also again collapsed. So again, I think it's simply interesting to ponder.

On the contrary, (in the US) I think there is at least enough land and resources (including food) that a modest haircut on the ultra-rich would go a long way for the lower-middle classes.

You got it exactly backwards. Population growth meant lots of children that consume but don't produce anything. This generates demand for workers who produce but don't consume (e.g. parents). Now that population growth has stopped, there are no more new consumers and the existing consumers are saturating, because they already have everything they could possibly want, with the exception of high priced things like housing.

Rising house prices increase the obligation to work for money, but they don't generate demand for more work. This leads to demand saturation.

Rich people do not generate demand, because they invest their surplus only when they expect to obtain an even greater surplus, which means they increase supply, which leads to even faster market saturation. You can't invest your way out of saturation unless you are okay with negative returns.

Communism is wrong, because its appeal lies in the fact that people hate their bosses. It literally tells you employment is the problem even though there have been historical periods after wars where markets were not saturated and the demand for labor was high. Employment was objectively good for workers during those times.

To this day communists do not have a theory that explains why there is a structural demand deficit for labor. The obvious answer is the one I laid out above. There are people who provide more labor hours to the market than they consume labor hours from the market, leading to an accumulation of labor hour credits (some people call it money) and the corresponding labor hour debit (some people call it debt). The communists would object to this by invoking their reserve army of labor theory, but that doesn't actually explain anything, it just shuffles around who gets hired. The argument is that competition between workers leads to employers only hiring the most productive employees that are necessary to supply the total demand for labor, but if the total demand for labor is equivalent to the supply of labor, there wouldn't be a reserve army in the first place. A critique based on competition leading to exploitation decides who wins the game of musical chairs, but it doesn't tell us why there is a shortage of musical chairs to begin with.

Obviously, the problem is the duration difference between the labor hour credit and the debit. You can hold labor hour credits at no cost, which is a free lunch. Holding labor hour debit means paying a fee and having a deadline each month, but the true duration of the debit is equal to the credit that created it. The demand for free lunches is infinite, which artificially inflates the holding period towards infinity and since one persons credit holdings are another persons debit holdings, debit is increasing towards infinity as well. This is what allows the labor demand deficit to grow over time.

The solution to this problem is to reject neoclassical economics with its automatic assumption of equilibrium and to build institutions that encourage equilibrium formation. The truth is that it's not only communists that hate equilibrium. Capitalists hate it as well.

Meanwhile the hype is causing things to be converted to "AI" even when it isn't any more efficient, which lowers labor demand (suppresses wages / increases unemployment, bad) and increases power demand (higher electricity prices, bad) and to the extent that hype causes adoption of inferior solutions, lowers efficiency (worthless AI customer service, bad). Some of the AI stuff is useful but the hype is causing folly.

Migration isn't particularly deflationary, especially with respect to housing prices since the new residents then increase housing demand, which is fine when construction isn't constrained by zoning but bad when it is, and right now, it is.

Most of the outsourcing that can reasonably happen already has, in large part because the US housing market (and therefore cost of living) has been out of whack for a long time, which makes US workers less competitive despite what would otherwise be various countervailing advantages. Things are made in China because they fit on a container ship, but that happened decades ago. Nurses and landscapers and firefighters and plumbers are still domestic and that isn't likely to change.