... after all, every single French politician of note is doing it.
The "student protests" are all about school conditions. That's why they're vandalizing and torching schools, looting businesses, defacing monuments, tearing apart historic buildings and torching irreplaceable architecture. It all seems reasonable when you think about it, particularly the part about how Muslim businesses have not been touched nor has a single mosque been touched.
Makes sense to me. I'm on Team Unicorn.
Even if we assumed the rationale for the, err, social movement as the tender folks at the Louvre put it when they posted on X that the museum was going to be closed for the time being, we still need to assess whether or not the French government could increase education funding even if it wanted to do so.
The answer is no.
 |
| For one thing, borrowing money so they can hand it to their students has gotten much more expensive. |
France is also spending a ton on the good stuff.
| Country | Total Government Expenditure (% of GDP) | Primary Spending Drivers |
|---|---|---|
| France | 57.0% – 57.2% | Highest in the EU; driven by extensive social protection systems (pensions, unemployment), healthcare, and public sector employment. |
| Italy | 50.4% – 51.2% | Substantial pension liabilities, demographic aging costs, and high sovereign debt interest servicing. |
| Germany | 49.4% – 50.5% | Comprehensive social insurance systems, federal subsidies for energy transition, and infrastructure/defense commitments. |
| Spain | 45.3% – 45.5% | Public healthcare and pension programs decentralized across autonomous communities; lower relative administrative overhead. |
| United Kingdom (England) | 44.0% – 44.6% | NHS healthcare delivery, state pension commitments, and debt interest, partially offset by lower general welfare replacement rates than continental peers. |
In short, there's no more money to spend and borrowing is out of the question.
So when the far-right, Hitler-wannabe Marine Le Pen says she wants to stand with the students and understands their plight and the commie what's-his-face does the same, it's all nonsense from the land of Unicornia.
There's no money. It's all been spent. Even if the "kids" really were lobbying for more Euros and not just trashing the place, they're gonna get stiffed.
Someone ought to tell them this. Someone might also want to hand them the bill for the clean up because the grownups are tapped out.
Nah.
Bonus Unicorn Content
Our granddaughter is 4 and loves unicorns. During a recent sleepover with Grammie, I used ChatGPT to make some coloring book pages for her featuring unicorns in different situations. My favorite had a unicorn with Jordan Peterson.
4 comments:
I was in Norway a couple of weeks ago on business[1], and one of the people I met with had come up from the head office in Paris. He was of the general opinion that everybody is simultaneously sore about the high taxes, and angry that those high taxes aren't providing the promised benefits. He didn't think it had anything to do with immigrants in particular, just straight-up making promises they couldn't keep, along with fiscal mismanagement.
Given that level of governement spending, I believe him.
In comparison, US federal spending has been around 23% of GDP
(https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S), and including state and local spending evidently brings it up to about 38% (https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND). Which is bad enough, but holy crap, France is a full 50% higher!
[1] We were visiting the manganese smelter in Kvinesdal to see what we could do about reprocessing their waste sludges. It's beautiful country, particularly if you like abrupt cliffs, lots of rocks, and fjords. That particular area was practically unpopulated, though. I probably didn't speak to more than maybe twenty actual Norwegians the whole time, and about half of those were the smelter personnel. I couldn't really say what the effect of immigrants might be on Norway, I certainly didn't see any where I was.
Tim, head office in Paris? Oslo? Or is this an EU thing?
I'd love to go to the "home" countries sometime.
MN: The smelter is owned by a French company with a head office in Paris. We ended up flying in to Stavanger, and then driving two hours along some of the most scenic coastline you could ask for. I got curious about the demographics of the Kvinesdal district, and Wikipedia says that a full 10% of the residents are US citizens. It seems a lot of people from there emigrated to the US between 1850 and 1950, and a significant number of their descendants later moved back to Norway.
An makes sense now. Thanks.
That's interesting. My ancestors emigrated to Wisconsin around 1900. Off the top of my head,
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