France, Taxes, and Math

I normally write a column every year (2021, 2020, 2019, etc) when the Tax Foundation releases its International Tax Competitiveness Index, in part because I’m curious to see how the United States compares to other developed nations.

I somehow overlooked the 2022 version, but there’s a very good reason to cite the Index today. In the latest version, Estonia retains its #1 ranking, which is no surprise.

And, as you can see from the map, France is #38, giving it the worst tax system among industrialized nations.

I want to focus on France because the nation is in the midst of a massive political controversy over President Macron’s plan to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64.

That’s too little and too late from my perspective, given the country’s terrible fiscal outlook.

Some people, however, don’t understand this reality. In a column for the New York Review, Madeleine Schwartz writes that Macron’s plan “has few supporters among French economists.” Here are some excerpts.

Macron and his defenders have called the reform a necessity. …But one group of voices has been missing among the commentators advocating for the change. “You won’t find many economists defending this reform,” says the economist Mathieu Plane, who works at the French Observatory of Economic Indicators… Patrick Artus, a well-known economist who currently works as an advisor to the French bank Natixis, told me that the government has several tools at its disposal… They might increase taxes. “The government has a complete block on raising taxes,” he says. “And yet there are some tax increases that would be legitimate.” …Instead the government has forced forward a law that many economists consider both inequitable and ineffective. …“It’s a pretty brutal measure,” says Camille Landais, chairman of the French Council of Economic Advisers.

Wow, what an indictment of French economists. Are they really that clueless? Are they the ones who are bad at math?

It’s hard to answer those question.

But I can say with certainty that big tax increases are not the solution when France already has the developed world’s worst tax system, with terrible grades in all but one category.

What’s especially amazing is that some of the French economists inadvertently confirm my argument that Macron did not go far enough.

A number of economists have questioned whether the reform would do much to solve the larger issue, which is that the population is aging and productivity levels do not balance the cost of demographic change. By making older workers work longer, the reform will only raise the employment rate by about one point, says Artus, even though France’s employment rate is about nine points less than, for example, Germany’s.

Yet, amazingly, their view is to do nothing other than double down on the policies that have produced low levels of employment.

I’ve joked in the past that economists are untrustworthy, and perhaps even despicable and loathsome. In France, it appears that my satire is reality.

P.S. Today’s column focused on France. For those interested in other nations, here’s the full Index.

The United States ranked #22, which is bad but not as bad as it used to be. Kudos to the Baltic nations, as well as New Zealand and Switzerland. Sympathy for the mistreated taxpayers of Italy and Portugal (as well as Ireland, where the benefits of a low corporate rate are offset by very bad scores in other areas).

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Political Drama: French Welfare State Showdown

I wrote last week about President Macron’s very modest effort to slow down the growth of the welfare state and started with a chart showing that France has the highest overall burden of government spending in the developed world.

The good news (relatively speaking) is that France is in third place, based on this chart from the OECD, when looking at the burden of government-provided retirement benefits.

To be sure, having the third-highest burden of retirement spending is hardly something to celebrate. And it is not exactly a big achievement to be slightly less worse than Greece and Italy.

This is why President Macron is pushing to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64.

But French voters and French lawmakers have an entitlement mentality and Macron’s initiative was faltering. So the government used executive authority to unilaterally impose the law.

Needless to say, this has triggered a lot of outrage. Here are some details from an article by Rich Noack in the Washington Post.

The French government used its executive powers Thursday to raise the retirement age to 64 and avoid a vote on an unpopular bill, outraging lawmakers who could retaliate with a no-confidence motion… Two-thirds of the French public have opposed the plans, and within minutes of Borne announcing the law’s adoption, demonstrators assembled near Parliament for their ninth day of mobilization, with some of them clashing with authorities. …Macron has been pushing for changes to the country’s pension system since he was elected in 2017… France has a lower minimum retirement age than many of its European neighbors… Germany, for instance, is preparing for an increase in the retirement age from 65 to 67, and lawmakers there have faced little public backlash. …Macron and his allies argue that the retirement age needs to reflect that increase if the country wants to preserve a welfare system that relies on a sufficiently large base of working-age contributors.

Here’s a chart from the article to show the excesses of the French system.

The Wall Street Journal opined this morning on the controversy.

The political difficulty of reforming pensions in Western democracies has been on display in France, with strikes and mass protests against Emmanuel Macron’s modest pension reform. …Give Mr. Macron credit for persistence—and political brass. …Thursday Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne invoked Article 49 of the French constitution, which enabled the Macron government to strong-arm a bill through the National Assembly without a vote. The National Assembly’s remaining recourse to block reform is to pass a motion of no confidence. That would block the legislation, oust Ms. Borne, and dissolve the government. …The opponents are on the populist left and right, including his presidential opponent in 2022, Marine Le Pen, who accused Mr. Macron of choosing “to govern with brutality” and called for Ms. Borne’s ouster. The cold reality is that France needs reform because its pay-as-you-go pension system is unsustainable. The retirement age is 62, one of the youngest in Europe, and Mr. Macron would stretch it only to 64 with some exceptions. The worker-to-retiree ratio has shrunk to 1.7 to 1 from 3 to 1 in 1970. French pensions already consume 14% of the economy.

The second-to-last sentence of the above excerpt deserves some emphasis.

Back in 1970, there were three workers (taxpayers) for every retiree. Now the ratio if 1.7 workers to every retiree, and that situation is going to get much worse over the next few decades (the same problem of demographic change exists in the United States).

So the real-world choice is reform or bankruptcy (especially since taxes already are maxed out).

P.S. Macron’s reform is better than the status quo, but it would be far better to shift to personal retirement accounts – which is something that has happened in dozens of nations.

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France and Fiscal Suicide

Which European nation has the costliest welfare state?

Greece would be a good guess, but it’s only in second place.

At the top of the list, according to OECD data, is France, where government spending consumes nearly 60 percent of the nation’s economic output.

These numbers are very depressing, but they are going to get worse over time.

Like most nations in Europe, France is dealing with demographic decline. People are living longer, and also having fewer children.

And that means fewer people pulling the wagon and more people riding in the wagon.

The net result is that the burden of government spending is going to climb by another 12 percentage points of GDP over the next four decades.

Looking at the two charts, it’s obvious that France has a massive fiscal problem.

If it stays on its current course, a Greek-style fiscal collapse is inevitable.

Which explains why President Macron has proposed to take a small step in the right direction by raising the retirement age from 62 to 64.

But even this modest reform is an outrage to some French leftists. In a column for the Washington Post, Rokhaya Diallo denounces the proposed change as an assault on “the French welfare model.”

Like tens of thousands of others, I was proud to be on the Place de la République recently to defend the legacy of the French welfare state. …Across the country, millions have gathered in periodic protests to defend one of the crown jewels of the French welfare model: the pension system. President Emmanuel Macron is determined to reform the pension system and to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64 (he first intended to push it to 65). …According to Macron, the calculus is simple: The French system cannot sustain itself financially, and because life expectancy is increasing, people have to work longer. …Big companies, however, have far more resources at their disposal than individual citizens, and raising corporate taxes would be a fairer way of increasing government revenue. …The fact that we live longer does not mean that we should spend our lives working for companies. Why should we subordinate our lives to the needs of capitalism?

At the risk of being snarky, Ms. Diallo is complaining about the reality of math rather than “the needs of capitalism.”

Though, by proposing higher taxes on French companies, she sort of acknowledges that the status quo is untenable.

So is Ms. Diallo’s proposed policy of higher taxes on workers, consumers, and shareholders a feasible solution to France’s ever-growing fiscal burden? Could all the built-in new spending (12 percentage points of GDP) be financed by a higher corporate tax rate?

No. Not even close. The French corporate tax rate currently is 25.8 percent and it collects about 2.3 percent of GDP according to OECD data.

Given her economic naivete, Ms. Diallo might support a very radical approach, such as doubling the corporate rate to more than 50 percent. And she might think that change would boost receipts from 2.3 percent of GDP to 4.6 percent of GDP.

But she would be wrong. Wildly wrong. As shown by this map from the Tax Foundation, France already has the fourth-highest corporate tax rate in Europe. Any increase (especially a big increase) will simply cause more business activity to leave France and go to nations with less-onerous tax policy.

In other words, a higher rate would not lead to a big increase in revenue. Indeed, it might do so much damage to the business climate that the government would collect less revenue.

And don’t forget that an additional 2.3 percent of GDP in revenue (assuming it magically materialized) is still far less than the built-in spending increase of 12 percent of GDP. So her math is wrong in two ways.

The bottom line is that France has two choices.

1. Stick with the status quo and eventually suffer a horrific fiscal crisis.
2. Enact reforms to prevent an ever-growing spending burden.

Macron’s reforms are grossly inadequate, but at least he wants to take a small step in the right direction. Ms. Diallo wants to put her head in the sand.

P.S. In her column, Ms Diallo notes that lower-income workers don’t live as long.

…mortality numbers vary among social classes. Nurses live seven years less than other women: 20 percent of them and 30 percent of nursing assistants retire with disabilities. Blue-collar workers live six years less than executives, so that one-quarter of the poorest men die by age 62, while 94 percent of the rich are still alive at 64. Only 40 percent of the poorest survive to 80, whereas 75 percent of the wealthiest do.

I want to congratulate her. She accidentally has provided a very good argument for why folks on the left should support personal retirement accounts.

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Macron’s Pension Reform Is Necessary (but Inadequate)

It is an understatement to declare that fiscal policy in France is terrible.

• The highest burden of government spending in Europe.
• The third-highest level of pension spending in the OECD.
• One of the biggest long-run fiscal gaps in OECD countries.
• The fourth-highest tax burden on workers in the OECD.
• The sixth-highest top tax rate among developed nations.

In recent years, France has had terrible presidents such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande.

But when Emmanuel Macron took over, I wondered whether he might push the nation in the right direction.

And he has pushed a few good ideas. But his achievements have been so meager that I was only half-joking when I wrote last year that his reelection meant that a socialist beat a socialist.

But maybe I’ll have to apologize for that column because Macron is pushing reforms to the country’s pay-as-you-go pension system.

In a column for CNN, David Andelman summarizes the plan and explains the motives.

…the French government announced plans to raise the official retirement age from 62 to 64 to qualify for a full pension. …The French budget risks floundering on pensions that are siphoning off nearly 14% of the nation’s GDP each year – roughly twice the drain than in the United Sates and behind only Italy and Greece in Europe. …Currently, all men and women in France can retire with full pensions at 62 – tied with Sweden and Norway for the lowest retirement age in western Europe. …there are special exemptions dating back to the time of Louis XIV. After performing on the stage for 10 years, actors of the Comédie Française…are entitled to claim a lifetime pension. This dates to the company’s creation in 1680. Dancers in the Paris Opera can retire with full pension at the age of 42, a custom that dates to 1689… Stagehands at both companies can still take their retirement at 57. Then there are train conductors who can bow out at age 52. …In all, there are at least 42 different pension schemes… “The French can count on our determination to block this unfair reform,” said Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally party, who Macron defeated in the presidential elections last April. At the other end of the spectrum, Mathilde Panot, from the far-left France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party tweeted that the plan was “archaic, unfair, brutal, cruel.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal opined last week in favor of Macron’s reform.

France currently has 42 different government-funded pension programs, which vary in retirement age and payout. Mr. Macron wants to wind down some of these programs and transition more French workers to a general pension scheme. That would make it easier for workers to change jobs, and it would also be a step toward a fairer pension system. This job mobility point is crucial and would benefit most workers and employers. …the French system scored a D grade, or 40.9 out of a possible 100, on financial sustainability on the Global Pension Index 2022, created by the consulting firm Mercer… The French system is a pay-as-you-go model in which current workers fund retiree pensions. Yet today there are only 1.7 workers for each retiree, compared to 3-to-1 in 1970 and headed to 1.4-to-1 by 2050. …Nothing short of French economic vitality is at stake. Mr. Macron twice won the Presidency with a vision of a more energetic, entrepreneurial France with more opportunity for young people. A more rational pension system is an essential part of the project.

The WSJ editorial is correct. Macron’s reform would give France a “more rational pension system.”

But it would not give the country a good pension system.

Macron is basically asking workers to pay more and get less. And it is true that his plan will prop up the government’s tax-and-transfer, pay-as-you-go scheme.

But that’s like patching the roof of a rotten house.

What France really needs is genuine reform so that younger workers can shift to a system of private savings. Which is something that already exists to varying degrees in other European nations such as Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

P.S. Back in 2010, France went through political turmoil to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.

P.P.S. Sadly, most of the flaws of France’s government retirement system are the same as the ones that exist in the United States.

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The Cost of Big Government in France

I often cite the OECD’s data on “actual individual consumption” to show that the average American enjoys higher living standards than the average European.

In this clip from a recent presentation, I compare the United States and France.

I’m motivated to write on this topic because of a recent tweet from Arnaud Bertrand.

I don’t know who he is, but he shares some very depressing data about the well-being of ordinary people in France.

The above data, according to Monsieur Bertrand, is before taxes on income.

Which makes me curious, of course, so I went to the OECD’s data on “Taxing Wages.”

Here is the data from Table 3.1, showing the tax burden on lower-income and middle-class taxpayers in France and the United States.

As you can see, the tax burden is much higher in France for every type of household. It doesn’t matter whether the household is single or married, the level of income, or the amount of children.

Indeed, the tax burden in France in every case is above the OECD average and the tax burden in the US is below average.

And don’t forget that average Americans also have much higher incomes than their French counterparts.

The bottom line is that Americans earn more and keep more. Something the keep in mind the next time one of our leftist friends agitates to make America more like Europe.

P.S. From the perspective of French taxpayers, the only good news is that nobody seems to be treated as poorly as the Spanish government treats Senor Alvarez.

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Hooray, the Socialist Beat the Socialist in France

Back in 2012, I endorsed a wretched socialist, Francois Hollande, to be president of France.

I knew he was terrible, but the supposedly right-wing incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, also was a proponent of dirigisme. As I wrote at the time, “it’s always better to let the left-wing party win when the supposedly right-wing party has a statist candidate.”

In France’s next election, in 2017, French voters faced a similarly dismal choice. Emmanuel Macron ran against Marine Le Pen and I urged voters to “pick the socialist over the socialist.”

Macron prevailed in that race and just won a rematch against Le Pen on Sunday.

I didn’t bother writing about the race ahead of time because it didn’t matter. Neither candidate promoted good ideas.

If you want to know France’s problems, the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World is a good place to start.

According to the most recent edition, France ranks #53, which is a very poor grade for a developed nation.

The country’s biggest problem is fiscal policy. Out of 163 nations, it ranks #155 for “size of government.”

That’s even worse than Greece.

And if you look at the historical data from the Fraser Institute, you’ll see that France’s score actually has declined since Macron won in 2017.

Not by much, to be sure, but still a move in the wrong direction. Moreover, given France’s demographic outlook, things will get much worse in the not-too-distant future.

All the more reason why I’m not excited about Macron’s reelection victory.

But what do others say?

If you want a semi-optimistic perspective, the Wall Street Journal opined on the potential implications and seems to think Macron’s heart is in the right place.

The question is whether Mr. Macron will do more in the next five years to make France great again. …Mr. Macron defies traditional political divisions. In his first term he appointed center-right figures to key positions and made progress with tax and labor reform.  …Ms. Le Pen…ran to his left on economics, calling for a wealth tax on financial assets and trade protectionism. …While Mr. Macron showed free-market instincts in his first term, he has tacked to the left recently to shore up support from young and progressive voters. Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon says he wants to be prime minister, and the coming National Assembly elections could be decisive in determining the direction of the country. Focusing on pro-growth reform—rather than climate obsessions or populist gestures like limiting executive pay—would help restore the economic vitality that Mr. Macron originally promised. It would also make it less likely for a radical like Ms. Le Pen or Mr. Mélenchon to take power in five years.

For a more negative perspective, here’s a CapX column from 2019, authored by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

…tax increases; a ballooning national debt and the highest government spending ratio to GDP in Europe… It’s become harder than ever to pinpoint a specific “Macron line”, but whatever it is, it isn’t a liberal one. …The president’s idea for modernising France’s industry is a mix of high-handed, interventionist industrial policy and a brushed-up reliance on top-down sectoral choices reminiscent of every single one of his predecessors, from de Gaulle onwards. …he announced €5bn investment into Le French Tech from well-coaxed institutional investors, with the aim of creating “25 French unicorns by 2025”. (The irony of having a government programme dedicated to create privately-held tech start-ups valued above $1bn seems to have escaped him). …The president’s policies oscillate according to polling and estimated image gains. As a result, the supposedly “courageous” reforms promised…are…watered down. …Macron believes sincerely in his top-down…plans.

For what it’s worth, I suspect Macron understands that his nation needs pro-market reform, but I also think he isn’t willing to take any risks to make it happen.

P.S. A few years ago, I shared a story that told you “everything you need to know about France.” Here are some excerpts from another story that captures the awful mindset holding back that country.

In less than three weeks, board game lovers in France bought all 10,000 copies of Kapital!, a new game about class struggle, injustice and French politics created by French sociologists. …One player will draw the good lot and fall among the rich; others will be the struggling poor and middle class. All players have to fight their way to the “tax haven” at the conclusion of the board. …The sociologists created the game to raise awareness about social injustice and the gap between the rich and poor. …The game was an instant success, selling out in less than three weeks.

This is almost as bad as the European Commission’s online game that was designed to brainwash children in favor of higher taxes.

P.P.S. Here’s a must-watch video explaining why America shouldn’t become another France.

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Comparing Prosperity: The United States vs. Europe

I periodically write about the importance of long-run growth and about the importance of convergence (whether poorer countries are catching up with richer countries, as suggested by theory).

This is because such data, especially over decades, teaches us very important lessons about the policies that are most likely to generate prosperity.

I’m revisiting these issues today because John Cochrane, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former professor of economics at the University of Chicago, recently wrote a column that contains a must-see chart showing how some of the major European nations have been losing ground to the United States over the past several decades.

The main thing to understand is that European nations were catching up to the United States after World War II, which is what one would expect.

But that trend came to a halt about 40 years ago and now these nations are suffering divergence instead of enjoying convergence.

Here’s some of Cochrane’s analysis.

…the US is 54% better off than the UK.. France…50% less than US. …the US is 96% better off than Italy. …And it’s been getting steadily worse. France got almost to the US level in 1980. And then slowly slipped behind. The UK seems to be doing ok, but in fact has lost 5 percentage points since the early 2000s peak. And Italy… Once noticeably better off than the UK, and contending with France, Italy’s GDP per capita is now lower than it was in 2000. GDP per capita is income per capita. The average European is about a third or more worse off than the average American, and it’s getting worse.

What’s most remarkable, as I wrote about back in 2014, is that the gap between the United States and Europe is “getting worse.”

Cochrane wonders if this is evidence against the European Union’s free-trade rules.

This should be profoundly unsettling for economists. Everyone thinks free trade is a good thing. The European union, one big integrated market, was supposed to ignite growth. It did not. The grand failure of the world’s biggest free trade zone really is a striking fact to gnaw on. Sure, other things are not held constant. Perhaps what should have been the world’s biggest free trade zone became the world’s biggest regulatory-stagnation, high-tax, welfare-state disincentive zone. Still, “it would have been even worse” is a hard argument to make.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s “a hard argument to make”. I’ve pointed out – over and over again – that Europe’s reasonably good policies in some areas are more than offset by really bad fiscal policy.

Think of the different types of economic policy as classes for a student. If a kid flunks one class, that’s going to produce a sub-par grade point average even if there was good marks in all the other classes.

That’s what has happened on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Europe is suffering the consequences of a stifling tax burden and an onerous burden of government spending.

Besides, I suspect some of the benefits of free trade inside the European Union are offset by the damage of the E.U.’s protectionist barriers against trade with the rest of the world.

P.S. Some people may wonder why Germany was not included in Cochrane’s chart. I assume that’s because the reunification of West Germany and East Germany about 30 years ago creates a massive discontinuity in the data. For those interested, Germany is slightly better off than France and the U.K., according to the Maddison data, but still lagging well behind the United States.

P.P.S. Speaking of Germany, the divergence between East Germany and West Germany teaches an obvious lesson.

P.P.P.S. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that America started out-performing Europe after Reaganomics was implemented.

P.P.P.P.S One obvious takeaway from Cochrane’s data (though not obvious to President Biden) is that the United States should not be copying Europe. Unless, of course, one wants ordinary Americans to be much poorer.

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Is France Suffering from Excessive Austerity?

If asked to describe French economic policy, rational people will use phrases such as “big government” and “high taxes.” Or perhaps “dirigisme” and “bureaucracy.”

And they would be correct.

Here’s a chart from the OECD, showing spending burdens for major European nations. In a continent that’s known for big welfare states and costly government, France (highlighted in red) easily ranks as the worst of the worst.

France also ranks as the worst of the worst when looking just at spending on social welfare programs.

Indeed, it’s probably just a matter of time before the country becomes another Greece.

But none of these facts matter to Rokhaya Diallo, a French journalist who thinks her nation’s government is too small.

I’m not joking. She actually wrote a column for the Washington Post asserting that France’s response to the corornavirus has been hampered by fiscal austerity.

…the government has failed multiple times at handling the crisis… It was a shock for citizens to discover that France — the world’s seventh largest economy, widely praised for its remarkable health system — could end up struggling to cover the basic needs of its hospitals. But was it a total surprise? Not really. …President Emmanuel Macron…policies…favored the richest fringes of the population while abandoning workers who did not earn enough to cover their necessities. …Under Macron, more than $3 billion (2.6 billion euros) has been cut from public hospitals in 2018 and 2019 — far more than under his predecessor. And it took the pandemic to ensure there were no further cuts to this vital infrastructure. …a politician who claimed he intended to govern a “start-up nation” and thereby support a neoliberal agenda. …For the past two decades, French public services have been damaged by austerity rules… The major health crisis has exposed the serious damages caused by the neoliberal turn implemented in France. At a moment when effective public services are needed more than ever before, austerity is a threat not only to the social stability but also the well-being of the population.

Wow. I’m reminded of the official from Belgium (3rd-biggest fiscal burden in the above chart) who complained a few years ago about “the small size of the Belgian government.”

These people must live in an alternative universe where facts don’t matter.

By the way, if Ms. Diallo is actually interested in “the well-being of the population,” I wonder what she thinks of the OECD data that shows that people in the bottom 10 percent in the United States are better off than the average middle class person in France?

Given that the United States, with its medium-sized government, does so much better than France, with its large-sized government, how can she reconcile those numbers with her dogmatic view that society will be better off if government is even bigger?

Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath expecting her to address these issues.

But the people of France have noticed something is wrong. Many of them would flee to the United States if they had the opportunity.

P.S. Regarding the title of Ms. Diallo’s column, neoliberal is the term used in Europe for classical liberals – i.e., advocates of small government and individual liberty.

P.P.S. The current president of France, Emmanuel Macron, has expressed some sympathy for market-oriented reforms, which may explain Ms. Diallo’s hostility (but does not justify her inaccuracy).

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Some Folks on the Left Are Honest…but Very Wrong

As part of my collection of honest leftists, I have a bunch of columns highlighting how some advocates of big government (including, to their credit, Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang) don’t hide from reality.

I’m unalterably opposed to their policies, but at least they openly admit that huge tax increases on ordinary people are needed in order to finance a European-style welfare state.

Now we have two more honest statists to add to our list.

In a column for the Washington Post, Eric Harris Bernstein and Ben Spielberg openly embrace huge tax increases on Americans with modest incomes.

They start by complaining that the tax burden is lower in the United States compared to other western nations.

A no-new-middle-class-taxes pledge…is seriously misguided. Middle-class taxes are a necessary and desirable part of a comprehensive, progressive policy framework… Democratic presidential candidates should make the case for middle-class taxes, not run from them. Here is a basic fact: The United States is a low-tax country. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, the United States ranked fourth-lowest in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (a consortium of 36 economically developed countries) in terms of tax revenue collected as a percentage of the economy — behind nations like Germany, Israel, Latvia and Canada. The gap between U.S. and average OECD revenue has widened over time, from 1.3 percentage points of gross domestic product in 1965 to 10 percentage points more recently. That’s nearly $2 trillion per year in forgone revenue from lower tax rates.

Interestingly (though not surprisingly), they don’t acknowledge that Americans are far richer than people in other advanced nations.

So maybe, just maybe, there’s a relationship between tax policy and economic outcomes.

The authors then complain that Reagan triggered an era of lower taxes for the non-rich. Oh, the horror!

In 1979, the year before Ronald Reagan was elected president, the average household in the middle quintile of the income distribution paid 19.1 percent of its income in federal taxes, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office. By 2016, that rate had dropped 5.2 percentage points, more than a quarter, to 13.9 percent. The story is similar for the second and fourth quintiles, which saw their rates decline by 5.6 and 3.8 percentage points respectively over the same period.

Here’s a graphic that accompanied the column.

As you can see, readers are supposed to conclude that the United States is “below average” compared to other developed nations.

What would it mean if politicians reversed all the tax cuts that started under Reagan?

The most revealing factoid from the column is their calculation that middle-income families should be paying $3800 more to the IRS every year.

In 2016, middle-quintile families paid $3,800 less in taxes than they would have at 1979 rates… Low middle-class taxes in the United States stand in stark contrast to the approach in other developed countries, which raise more revenue from the middle class through some combination of taxes on goods and services, payroll taxes, and income taxes.

And don’t forget that the authors don’t just want to go back to 1979 tax rates.

They want America to become another France.

Somehow, I suspect America’s middle-class does not want to be pillaged like their European counterparts.

Amazingly, it gets even worse. The authors want more debt-financed spending and they even endorse the perpetual motion machine of “modern monetary theory.”

Of course, middle-class tax increases are not the only means of providing these public goods. Trillions of dollars can be raised through various taxes on the rich… And funding public investments with government debt, which modern monetary theory’s adherents recommend, is a far better approach than requiring every program to have a designated “payfor.” The government is uniquely positioned to borrow money, and we shouldn’t let unsubstantiated, theoretical concerns about debt levels prevent us from addressing the concrete and urgent needs of today.

I could end the column at this point and simply observe that it’s good to find honest folks on the left, even if they’re wildly wrong.

But the authors of the column unintentionally have given me an excuse to make a key point about taxes, growth, the economy, and the Laffer Curve.

Their graphic inserted above reveals that the overall tax burden in France consumes 46.1 percent of GDP in France, nearly twice as high as the United States.

But high tax rates don’t necessarily produce high tax revenues.

Indeed, I crunched data from the International Monetary Fund and found that per-capita revenues in France are only about 10 percent higher than they are in the United States.

I’m sure Art Laffer won’t be surprised by these results. Neither would Ibn Khaldun.

The bottom line is that most people in Europe are subject to much higher tax rates, which leads to lower living standards and weaker economies, which means there’s not even a lot of tax revenue to spend.

Would your family be willing to give up $10,000, $15,000, or $20,000 of income just so politicians could spend an extra $2,000 per household?

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New Tax Rankings: Estonia on Top, France at the Bottom, and Progress for the USA

The Tax Foundation churns out lots of good information, but I especially look forward to their International Tax Competitiveness Index.

It shows how nations rank based on key tax variables such as corporate taxation, personal income tax, and international tax rules.

The latest edition shows good news and bad news for the United States. The good news, as you see in this chart, is that the 2017 tax reform improved America’s ranking from 28 to 21.

The bad news is that the United States is still in the bottom half of industrialized nations.

We should copy Estonia, which has been in first place for six consecutive years.

For the sixth year in a row, Estonia has the best tax code in the OECD. Its top score is driven by four positive features of its tax code. First, it has a 20 percent tax rate on corporate income that is only applied to distributed profits. Second, it has a flat 20 percent tax on individual income that does not apply to personal dividend income. Third, its property tax applies only to the value of land, rather than to the value of real property or capital. Finally, it has a territorial tax system that exempts 100 percent of foreign profits earned by domestic corporations from domestic taxation, with few restrictions. …For the sixth year in a row, France has the least competitive tax system in the OECD. It has one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the OECD (34.4 percent), high property taxes, a net tax on real estate wealth, a financial transaction tax, and an estate tax. France also has high, progressive, individual income taxes that apply to both dividend and capital gains income.

Here are some other important observations from the report, including mostly positive news on wealth taxation as well as more information on France’s fiscal decay.

…some countries like the United States and Belgium have reduced their corporate income tax rates by several percentage points, others, like Korea and Portugal, have increased them. Corporate tax base improvements have been put in place in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, while tax bases were made less competitive in Chile and Korea. Several EU countries have recently adopted international tax regulations like Controlled Foreign Corporation rules that can have negative economic impacts. Additionally, while many countries have removed their net wealth taxes in recent decades, Belgium recently adopted a new tax on net wealth. …Over the last few decades, France has introduced several reforms that have significantly increased marginal tax rates on work, saving, and investment.

For those who like data, here are the complete rankings, which also show how countries score in the various component variables.

Notice that the United States (highlighted in red) gets very bad scores for property taxation and international tax rules. But that bad news is somewhat offset by getting a very good score on consumption taxation (let’s hope politicians never achieve their dream of imposing a value-added tax!).

And it’s no big surprise to see countries like New Zealand and Switzerland get high scores.

P.S. My only complaint about the International Tax Competitiveness Index is that I would like it to include even more information. There presumably would be challenges in finding apples-to-apples comparative data, but I’d be curious to find out whether Hong Kong and Singapore would beat out Estonia. And would zero-tax jurisdictions such as Monaco and the Cayman Islands get the highest scores of all? Also, what would happen if a variable on the aggregate tax burden was added to the equation? I’m guessing some nations such as Sweden and the Netherlands might fall, while other countries such as Chile and Poland (and probably the U.S.) would climb.

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Yellow Vest Protesters in France =/= Tea Party Activists in America

I admired the Tea Party because it was made up of people who were upset by the bipartisan waste and corruption of Washington. And I think they even had a positive – albeit only temporary – effect.

But the “Yellow Vest” protesters in France, as I explain in this interview, are much less coherent.

Needless to say, I’m glad the Yellow Vests are upset about France’s oppressive tax regime. In that sense, they are like the Tea Party in America.

But the Tea Party also wanted smaller government. That doesn’t seem to be the case in France.

Which means the Yellow Vests are either ignorant or hypocritical. After all, the burden of government spending is very onerous in France, and the country also has high levels of debt. So how is the government supposed to lower taxes unless there’s at least some degree of spending restraint?!?

Some of the Yellow Vests seem to think that class-warfare taxes on the rich could be a silver bullet, but that didn’t work for Francois Hollande and there’s no reason to think it would work for Emmanuel Macron.

Ironically, some American politicians think America should copy France.

Veronique de Rugy, who was born and raised in France but is now an American, explained for FEE why her former nation is not a role model.

…what Sanders and AOC actually have in mind is a regime more like that of France. …That’s because there is one aspect in particular that the AOCs and Sanders of the world fail to mention to their followers when they talk about their socialist dream: all of the goodies that they believe the American people are entitled to receive in fact come at a great cost—and so the only way to pay for these goodies is with oppressive and regressive taxes (i.e., taxes heaped on to the backs of the middle class and the poor). …Paris relies disproportionately on social-insurance, payroll and property taxes. …In France, VAT and other consumption taxes make up 24% of revenue… Consumption taxes often fall hardest on the poor and middle class, who devote a greater proportion of their income to consumption.

Amen.

Big government means stifling taxes on lower-income and middle-class taxpayers. This is the point I’ve made, over and over again.

But Veronique notes that France also suffers from excessive regulation and other forms of intervention.

France has all sorts of labor regulations on the books: some preventing firms from firing workers and, hence, creating a disincentive to hire workers in the first place. …the French also have all sorts of “generous” family friendly laws that end up backfiring and penalizing female employment. …All of these policies make the lives of lower and middle-class people harder… The bottom line is this: All those people in America who currently fall for the socialism soup that AOC and Sanders are selling need to realize that if their dream came to pass, they, not the rich—not the bankers and politicians—will be ones suffering the most from the high taxes, high unemployment, and slow growth that go hand in hand with the level of public spending they want.

Interestingly, Bloomberg recently reported that the French want tax cuts.

The French want to pay less tax. That was the clear message that emerged from a two-month “Great Debate” that saw voters present their grievances and suggest remedies to President Emmanuel Macron. …Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said…“The clear message is that taxes must fall and fall fast.” …Macron announced the “Great Debate” in December to respond to the Yellow Vest protests… Among the findings, valued added tax and income tax were the levies that most people listed as needing reduction. …For 75 percent of the participants, the lower taxes must be accompanied by cutting government spending, though they were vague about where the cuts should come, with 75 percent citing “the lifestyle of the state.”

This is all good news. And it does echo polling data I shared back in 2013.

But I’m nonetheless skeptical. I suspect the French (including the Yellow Vests) would be rioting in the streets if the government proposed to curtail the nation’s bloated welfare state.

Though I hope I’m wrong.

In any event, there are signs that President Macron actually does want to move policy in the right direction.

He’s already gone after some bad tax and regulatory barriers to prosperity.

And the Wall Street Journal recently opined about his effort to trim the country’s massive bureaucracy.

The French President is still reeling from months of “yellow vest” protests against his poorly conceived fuel-tax hike, but now he has a much better idea to take on France’s infamously bloated civil service. …Bureaucrats would lose much of their extra time off and instead work the 35-hour week that’s standard in the private economy. The plan would streamline staff reassignments within the civil service and make it easier for local officials to reorganize government departments. …if the reforms happen, they’ll still be a long-overdue step in a country where 5.5 million government employees out of a population of 67 million consume around 13% of GDP in wages. …The political test will be whether Mr. Macron can dust himself off from his fuel follies and persuade French voters to embrace another crucial reform.

I’ll close with the pessimistic observation that France may have passed the tipping point.

Simply stated, government is so big and there’s so much dependency that real reform is politically impossible.

Heck, I worry the United States is on the same trajectory.

P.S. Veronique has a must-watch video explaining why America shouldn’t become another France.

P.P.S. While I’m sympathetic to Macron’s domestic agenda, he’s very bad on European-wide policy issues.

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Trump Treasury Secretary Supports French Tax Harmonization Scheme

Much to the consternation of some Republicans, I periodically explain that the Trump Administration is – at best – a mixed blessing for supporters of limited government.

It’s not just that Trump is the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover, though that’s certainly a damning indictment.

The Trump White House also has been very weak on government spending, and the track record on that issue could get even worse since the President supports a new entitlement for childcare.

Yes, there are issues where Trump has been a net plus for economic liberty.

The overall regulatory burden is declining (though the Administration’s record is far from perfect when looking at anti-market interventions).

And the President gets a good mark on tax policy thanks to the Tax Cut and Jobs Act.

But Trump’s grade on that issue may be about to drop thanks to horribly misguided actions by his Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. Here are some excerpts from a report by France 24.

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that the US supported a push by France for a minimum corporate tax rate for developed countries worldwide… “It’s something we absolutely support, that there’s not a chase to the bottom on taxation,” Mnuchin said in Paris after talks with Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. Le Maire said last month a minimum tax rate would be a priority for France during its presidency of the G7 nations this year. …France in particular has railed against Amazon, Google and other technology giants that declare their European income in low-tax countries like Ireland or Luxembourg.

Needless to say, it’s utterly depressing that a Republican (in name only?) Treasury Secretary explicitly condemns tax competition.

Politicians and their flunkies grouse about a “race to the bottom” when tax competition exists, not because tax rates would ever drop to zero (we should be so lucky), but because they don’t like it when the geese with the golden eggs have the ability to fly away.

They like having the option of ever-higher taxes.

In reality, the world desperately needs tax competition to reduce the danger of “goldfish government,” which occurs when vote-seeking politicians can’t resist the temptation to destroy an economy with too much government (see Greece, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc).

I’ll close with a remarkable observation.

The Obama Administration supported a scheme that would have required American companies to pay a tax of at least 19 percent on income earned in other jurisdictions, even if tax rates were lower (as in Ireland) or zero (as in Cayman).

This was very bad policy, completely contrary to the principle of “territorial taxation” that is part of all market-friendly tax reforms such as the flat tax.

Yet Trump’s Treasury Secretary, by prioritizing tax revenue over prosperity, is supporting a proposal for global minimum tax rates that is much worse than what the Obama Administration wanted.

And even further to the left compared to the policy supported by Bill Clinton.

P.S. I’m sure the bureaucrats at the European Commission and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are delighted with Mnuchin’s policy, especially since American companies will be the ones most disadvantaged.

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Socialism in the Modern World, Part IV: French Dirigisme

My multi-part series on Socialism in the Modern World has featured Venezuela, the Nordic nations, and Greece.

But no discussion of dirigiste policy would be complete without a look at France.

After all, not only does France have a history of imposing 100-percent-plus tax rates, it also hold the dubious honor of being Europe’s biggest welfare state.

And it has the highest overall burden of government spending.

These are not good numbers, especially when you consider the demographic changes that are happening in Europe.

Sadly, there’s a long history of French statism. Andras Toth of the Carl Menger Institute explained some of the France’s grim economic history.

If there is an example of a dirigiste, interventionist state, then that is France in Europe. France was the birthplace of the mercantilist, absolutist monarchy in the early modern period. …the practice of mercantilist protection and monopolization of key industries, including the state-mandated “industrial development policies” …Under the rule of the famous finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert… France sank into a series of crises and lost her preeminent position in Europe. …The modern French state is the stepchild of the political culture of the Bourbons. It is the prime example of dirigisme. It redistributes as much as 56 percent of annual GDP and imposes the highest tax burden in Europe. The French state directly manages key industries and sustains one of the largest welfare states in Europe. It also imposes complicated bureaucratic red tape on economic actors, trailing way behind the Scandinavian states and Germany as far as ease of business is concerned.

Though he also explains that the current president seems to understand that France needs less government and more economic freedom.

Macron was the first French politician to build his election campaign on reform and competitiveness in order to keep up France’s position in the world. Those who voted for him knew what to expect. As a member of Hollande’s team, he proposed increasing the work week from 35 to 37 hours to lessen the tax burden on higher incomes, and the competitiveness package he developed aimed to lessen the protection of workers and companies in order to promote growth. …France is again at a crossroads: She has to choose between the policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and those of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, the great French liberal economist who was the economic minister of France between 1774 and 1776 and who argued for free trade, less taxation, and less regulation.

I also sympathize with what Macron is trying to achieve (at least with regard to domestic reforms).

But I fear it may be too little and too late.

Especially since the New York Times reports that Macron is increasingly unpopular.

…attacks…that Mr. Macron is a self-seeking servant of society’s fortunate… The undisguised hostility has made clear that, less than a year into this new presidency, anti-Macron sentiment is emerging as a potent force. It is being fueled by a pervasive sense that Mr. Macron is pushing too far, too fast in too many areas — nicking at the benefits of pensioners and low earners, giving dollops to the well-off and slashing sacred worker privileges.

Though he does deserve some of his unpopularity. He imposed green taxes late last year that triggered nationwide riots from motorists and other unhappy citizens.

But he’s also unpopular for some of his good policies, which leads me to fear that France may be past the tipping point, meaning that genuine and meaningful reform no longer is possible because too many voters are on the government teat.

I hope that’s not the case. France used to be one of the most wealthy and powerful nations in the world. But now its living standards are barely average according to the OECD’s AIC numbers.

Because of the ongoing debate about what the term actually means, it’s unclear whether France’s tepid economic performance can be blamed on socialism.

But we shouldn’t doubt that the country is paying a considerable price for having too much government.

P.S. My favorite cartoon about French socialism actually features Barack Obama.

P.P.S. One of the world’s greatest economists was French, but politicians in France obviously ignored Bastiat just like they ignored Turgot.

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France, Taxes, and Riots

Maybe there’s hope for France. When Greeks, Belgians, and the Brits riot, it’s because they want more handouts.

The French, by contrast, have taken to the streets to protest higher taxes. And they have plenty of reasons to be upset, as the Wall Street Journal reports.

France became the most heavily taxed of the world’s rich countries in 2017… The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s annual review of taxes in its 36 members published on Wednesday showed the French government’s tax revenues were the equivalent of 46.2% of economic output, up from 45.5% in 2016 and 43.4% in 2000. The Danish government’s tax take, which was the highest among OECD members between 2002 and 2016, fell to 46% of gross domestic product from 46.2% in the previous year and 46.9% in 2000. …The rise in French tax revenues was in line with a longstanding trend… The average tax take across the organization’s members edged up to 34.2% of GDP in 2017 from 34% in 2016 and 33.8% in 2000.

I suppose we should applaud Denmark for no longer being at the top of this list.

The tax burden on Danes is still absurdly high, but at least there is a small bit of progress (presumably because of a modest amount of long-overdue spending restraint).

Shifting back to France, the WSJ story mentions that the French president had to retreat on his plan for higher fuel taxes.

President Emmanuel Macron backed off a fuel-tax increase that enraged much of the nation and sparked a grass-roots protest movement against his government. …Before Tuesday’s climb down, Mr. Macron’s government had planned to raise fuel taxes in an effort to cut automobile pollution. …But the planned move sparked the worst riots to hit Paris in decades on Saturday, leaving the city’s shopping and tourist center dotted with burning cars and damaged storefronts. Protesters vandalized the Arc de Triomphe, rattling Mr. Macron’s administration and the country.

For what it’s worth, I’m glad Macron backed down. He actually has some good proposals to liberalize the French economy. That’s where he should be focused, not on concocting new ways to fleece citizens.

To be sure, over-taxation is not limited to France. Here are the most heavily taxed nations according to the OECD report.

Income taxes and payroll taxes generate most of the revenue, as you can see. But keep in mind that all of these countries also have onerous (and ever-increasing) value-added taxes, as well as other levies.

If I was in France (or any of these nations), the first thing I would point out is that people are getting ripped off.

A huge chunk of their income is seized by tax collectors, yet they’re not getting better services in exchange.

Are schools, roads, and healthcare in France better than they are in Switzerland or New Zealand, where the burden of government is much lower?

Or are they better in France than they are in Hong Kong and Singapore, where the fiscal burden is much, much lower?

The European Central Bank confirms that the answer is no.

Here is the data on taxes and spending for OECD member nations. For some reason, not all countries in the OECD’s tax database are included in the OECD’s spending database. Regardless, the obvious takeaway is that big welfare states require confiscatory tax regimes (with the middle class getting pillaged).

A few closing observations on this data.

• Governments also have non-tax revenues, so red ink is only a partial explanation for the gap between spending and taxes in various nations.
• Because of somewhat distorted GDP data, the actual tax burden in Ireland and Luxembourg is worse than shown in these numbers.
• From 1965-present, the tax burden has increased the most in Greece. Needless to say, that has not been a recipe for economic or fiscal success.
• The U.S. has a modest fiscal burden compared to other industrialized nations, which helps to explain why living standards are higher in America.
• Mexico is not a low-tax nation. Like many developing economies, its government is simply too incompetent and corrupt to enforce onerous tax laws.

Circling back to our main topic, I joked years ago that the French national sport is taxation. It’s so bad that thousand of taxpayers have faced effective tax rates of more than 100 percent. Indeed, taxes are so onerous that even EU bureaucrats have warned taxes are excessive.

P.S. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that more than half the population would flee to America if they had the opportunity.

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Two-Plus Cheers for President Macron’s Plan to Gut the French Exit Tax

Assuming elected officials care about the consequences of their actions, the obvious answer to a question isn’t always the right answer.

• Q: Why should a (sensible) politician oppose the minimum wage, especially since some workers will get a pay hike?

A: Because the bottom rungs of the economic ladder will disappear and marginally skilled people will lose a chance to find employment and develop work skills.

• Q: Why should a (sensible) politician oppose so-called employment-protection legislation, especially since some employees will be protected from dismissal?

A: Because employers will be less likely to hire workers if they don’t have the freedom to fire them if circumstances change.

• Q: Why should a (sensible) politician oppose class-warfare taxation, especially since they could redistribute money to 90 percent of voters?

A: Because the short-run benefits of buying votes will be offset by long-run damage to investment, competitiveness, and job creation.

Many politicians are not sensible, of course, which is why bad policy is so common.

So it’s worth noting when someone actually makes the right decision, especially if they do it for the right reason.

With that in mind, President Emmanuel Macron deserves praise for gutting his country’s punitive “exit tax.” The U.K.-based Financial Times has the key details.

French president Emmanuel Macron said that he would remove the so-called exit tax as it was damaging for France’s image as a place to do business. The tax requires those entrepreneurs or investors who hold more than €800,000 in financial assets or at least 50 per cent of a company to pay capital gains up to 15 years after leaving France.  …A finance ministry spokesperson on Saturday confirmed “the removal of the exit tax as it existed.” …”The exit tax sends a negative message to entrepreneurs in France, more than to investors. Why? Because it means that beyond a certain threshold, you are penalised if you leave,” Mr Macron had said… “I don’t want any exit tax. It doesn’t make sense. People are free to invest where they want. I mean, if you are able to attract [investment], good for you, but if not, one should be free to divorce,” added the French president.

Kudos to Macron. He not only points out that such a tax discourages investment and entrepreneurship, but he also makes the moral argument that people should be free to leave a jurisdiction that mistreats them.

To be sure, the proposal isn’t perfect.

Mr Macron has now decided to introduce a new “anti-abuse” tax targeted at assets sold within two years of someone leaving the country. …“The new system will henceforth target divestments occurring shortly after leaving France — two years — to avoid letting people make short trips abroad in order to optimise tax efficiencies,” added the spokesperson.

This is why I gave the plan two-plus cheers instead of three cheers.  Though I understand the political calculation. It would create a lot of controversy if a rich person moved for one year to one of the several European nations that have no capital gains tax (Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, etc), sold their assets, and then immediately moved back to France the following year.

The right policy, needless to say, is for there to be no capital gains tax, period.

But let’s not get sidetracked. Here are a few additional details from Reuters.

France imposed the so-called “Exit Tax” in 2011 during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. …Its aim was to stop individuals temporarily changing their tax domicile in order to skirt French taxes but pro-business President Emmanuel Macron says it damages France’s attractiveness as an investment destination.

Yes, you read correctly, the class-warfare policy wasn’t imposed by the hard-left Francois Hollande, but by the Nicolas Sarkozy, the supposed conservative but de-facto leftist who preceded him.

What’s particularly bizarre is that Macron was a senior official for Hollande, yet he is the pro-market reformer who is trying to save France.

P.S. I’m embarrassed to admit that the United States has a very punitive exit tax (which Hillary Clinton wanted to make even worse).

P.P.S. Since one of my three examples at the beginning of today’s column dealt with the perverse consequences of “employment-protection laws,” I suppose it’s worth noting that’s another area where Macron is trying to reduce government intervention.

P.P.P.S. While Macron is a pro-market reformer at the national level, he advocates very bad ideas for the European Union.

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The Macron Paradox: Internal Liberalization, External Statism

In last year’s French presidential election between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, I joked that voters should choose the socialist over the socialist, but made a serious point that Macron – despite having been part of Hollande’s disastrous government – was preferable since there was at least a hope of market-oriented reform.

…the chance of Macron being good are greater than zero. After all, it was the left-wing parties that started the process of pro-market reforms in Australia and New Zealand. And it was a Social Democrat government in Germany that enacted the labor-market reforms that have been so beneficial for that nation.

And after Macron won the election, I reviewed some of his initiatives to restrain government, including plans to reduce the burden of government spending, lower France’s corporate tax rate, and to shrink the size of the bureaucracy.

His ideas sounded so good that I wrote – only partly in jest – that “I wish the Republicans in Washington were as sensible as these French socialists.”

We’re not quite to the one-year anniversary of his election, but let’s take a look at Macron’s track record. And we’ll start with a very encouraging report from the New York Times.

…if France’s young president, Emmanuel Macron, has made one thing clear, it is that he is not afraid to shake up France and take on its venerable institutions. Now it is the turn of the heavily subsidized and deeply indebted French rail system. Mr. Macron says he wants to erase the railway workers’ special status, which gives them more generous benefits than almost any other workers, including a guarantee of early retirement. In doing so, he has set himself a new and formidable challenge in his expanding campaign to reshape France’s society and economy, which started last year with a law that made it easier for private companies to hire and fire workers, a near revolution for France.

Macron has a difficult task.

…the railway workers are a public-sector work force, one of the most powerful in the country, with a chokehold on as many as five million riders daily. When they go on strike, the whole country feels it. …rail unions have already pledged to join a strike by public-sector employees planned for Thursday… The rail workers then plan weeks of strikes starting in April that will be staged on a rolling basis.

Here’s some of what Macron wants to fix.

French rail workers’ current, ample benefits — including in some cases, the option of retiring at 52 — date to the first half of the 20th century, when many railway jobs involved hard, physical labor… Mr. Macron…to push for a broader overhaul that, for new hires, would end advantages like guaranteed jobs, automatic pay raises and generous social security benefits. …The French rail system is both heavily subsidized and deeply in debt, to the tune of 55 billion euros, or about $68 billion.

And if the French President succeeds, there are other reforms on the horizon.

Mr. Macron has pledged to follow the railway plan with an overhaul of the unemployment system later in the year. Next year he intends to take on the French pension system. …changing the employment terms for railway workers appears to be part of a larger crusade to push French workers into the 21st century.

Good. Similar reforms were very beneficial for German workers and the German economy, so I’m sure Macron’s proposals will produce good results in France.

Writing last October for CapX, Diego Zuluaga expressed optimism about Macron’s agenda.

…it is the French government that is tackling the big barriers to growth and dynamism that have stifled their economy since 1975. …Emmanuel Macron…has vowed to attack this status quo. He aims to deconstruct the onerous French labour market law, the infamous Code du travail. This is a 1,600-page, 10,000-article gargantuan piece of legislation which is blamed for clobbering employment in France over the past 25 years. …Macron may be able to deliver considerable reforms when it comes to the labour market. His cabinet intends to move a larger share of collective bargaining to the firm level, remove the requirement of union representation for small- and medium-sized businesses, limit severance pay – right now it averages €24,000 per dismissal – to give employers greater certainty about the costs of hiring… Spain reformed its dysfunctional hiring and firing regulations in 2012, and robust employment growth followed. Now, it is long-ossified France that is taking up the baton.

If you stopped reading at this point, you might conclude that Macron is a French version of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher.

But that would be a considerable exaggeration. The French President also is pushing some questionable policies, such as higher taxes on luxury goods. But, in Macron’s defense, those class-warfare taxes are an offset for the abolition of the wealth tax, which was a very good reform.

Emmanuel Macron’s administration will propose a tax on luxury yachts, supercars and precious metals in France’s 2018 budget. Lawmakers will propose amendments after critics attacked the President’s move to scrap the wealth tax in France. Mr Macron abolished the tax, which has been seen as a symbol of social justice for the left but blamed by others for driving thousands of millionaires abroad. …The wealth tax, introduced by the Socialists in the 1980s, was levied on individuals with assets above 1.3 million euros (£1.2 million).

Since I’m not familiar with the details (i.e., do these changes result in a revenue-neutral shift, a net tax cut, or a net tax increase?), there’s no way to determine if swapping the wealth tax for luxury taxes is a net positive or a negative. Though I assume the overall effect is positive because wealth taxes are a very bad idea and luxury taxes, while self-destructive, generally are futile.

But this doesn’t let Macron off the hook. Even if we decide that he’s a pro-market reformer inside his country, he has a very bad habit of promoting statism at the European level.

The Wall Street Journal opined unfavorably last year on his plan for greater centralization.

…the French President issued a call for more, more and more Europe. …His EU would be responsible for many of the functions traditionally performed by a nation-state, such as defense, taxation, migration control and economic regulation. …The problem is…Mr. Macron’s dreams of fiscal and economic union. He wants to create an EU finance ministry, funded by corporate and other taxes, that can spend money across the bloc with minimal interference from national capitals. Mr. Macron also wants to harmonize—eurospeak for raise—corporate taxes across the EU. He’d further establish Franco-German regulatory excess as the benchmark for the rest of the EU… This is a recipe for political failure because Europeans already know these policies are economic duds.

Writing for the New York Times, a German journalist poured cold water on Macron’s plan to give redistribution powers to the European Union.

It would be funny if it weren’t dangerous — the solution offered by the new, pro-Europe president, Emmanuel Macron, is to create a eurozone budget, with its own finance minister. …Mr. Macron’s proposal is a disaster in the making. It will only further alienate Europeans from one another and weaken the bloc economically. …Brussels’s money has often been Europe’s curse. The Greek government, for instance, knew it could take for granted the support of the other euro members for its unsustainable budget after Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany recklessly declared, “If the euro fails, Europe fails.” Athens slowed down on reform, knowing Brussels would bail it out, and northern Europeans grew angry. In the worst case, Mr. Macron’s plan could turn this disincentive into a characteristic feature of the European Union. …Brussels would end up holding the purse but not the purse strings.

So what’s the story with Macron’s schizophrenic approach? Why is he a pro-market Dr. Jekyll for French policy but a statist Mr. Hyde for European policy?

I don’t have the answer, but Diego Zuluaga wrote about this dichotomy for CapX.

The puzzle of Macronism is that it tends to advocate dynamism at home, but stasis abroad. The French President, both during his tenure in Hollande’s cabinet and in his new office, has championed reform of the country’s bewilderingly byzantine employment code, which has promoted social exclusion and led to a high rate of structural unemployment. …But Macron’s liberalism seemingly stops at France’s borders. On the EU level, he has called for increased risk-sharing among euro member states, a eurozone budget and finance minister… Whatever one makes of his climate-change activism, it is nothing if not dirigiste in the extreme, wishing to curb carbon emissions through bureaucratic pacts on a global level. What we are left with is the pro-market equivalent of Stalin’s pre-WWII economic policy of  “socialism in one country”. Liberalism in one country acknowledges the need for economic flexibility and a greater reliance on market forces at home. It champions tax reform and deregulation of industry and hiring. But it shuns those principles on the international level.

By the way, Mr. Zuluaga is using “liberalism” in the classic sense, meaning pro-market policies.

Let’s close with a couple of items that show France still has a long way to go.

First, a leftist columnist wants us to believe that recent riots, caused by a sale on Nutella, are symbolic of a dystopian future.

You may have seen the videos: in French supermarkets Intermarché, customers are rushing towards shelves of Nutella jars. They’re running, shouting, fighting, rummaging to grab a jar of the chocolate flavoured paste… This mess happened simultaneously in various French supermarkets when grocery chain Intermarché advertised a massive sale on 1kg Nutella jars, priced at €1,41 instead of the usual €4,50. …I don’t find this news funny, not even remotely. …it is telling of a France that is more and more divided… The massive response to this sale shines light…on the precarious position in which many French workers, and shoppers, find themselves. …And it’s not going to get any better for them. Macron’s looming labour reform is already eroding French workers’ rights… Macron’s great vision for France increasingly looks like a country where only the rich and “successful” will be able to afford Nutella – and those who “are nothing” will be left to fight for sale prices.

This type of over-wrought analysis makes me want to cheer for Macron.

Why? Because I understand that the best hope for workers is faster growth, not “labor-protection policies” that actually undermine job creation and cause wages to stagnate.

Second, we have a story that highlights the impossible regulatory burden in France.

A French boulanger has been ordered to pay a €3,000 fine for working too hard after he failed to close his shop for one day a week last summer. …Under local employment law, two separate regulations from 1994 and 2000 require bakers’ shops to close once a week… He has been advised the only way to get around the regulations would be to open a second boulangerie with different opening hours. …The federation of Aube boulangeries and patisseries questioned 126 members at the end of last year: the majority were in favour of maintaining the obligatory one-day closure. Eric Scherrer of the retail union CLIC-P, said French employment laws were there to protect workers and employers and had to be respected. …“These people need to have a rest day each week. We can’t just allow them to work non-stop. It’s absolutely necessary that both bosses and employees have a day of rest.”

The bottom line is that Macron should drop his statist European-wide proposals and put all of his focus on fixing France.

If you look at his country’s scores from Economic Freedom of the World, he should be working day and night to reduce the fiscal burden of government.

And lowering the regulatory burden should be the second-most important priority.

P.S. If the numbers in this poll are still accurate, Macron better fix his nation’s bad policies or his productive citizens will escape to America. After all, France is a great place to live if you’re already rich, but not so good if you aspire to become rich.

P.P.S. Here’s a story highlighting the lavish government-financed benefits for the privileged class in France.

P.P.P.S. My favorite French-themed cartoon features Obama and Hollande.

P.P.P.P.S. And let’s not forget Paul Krugman’s conspiracy theory about a “plot against France.”

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The Best and Worst News of 2017

Since it’s the last day of the year, let’s look back on 2017 and highlight the biggest victories and losses for liberty.

For last year’s column, we had an impressive list of overseas victories in 2016, including the United Kingdom’s Brexit from the European Union, the vote against basic income in Switzerland, the adoption of constitutional spending caps in Brazil, and even the abolition of the income tax in Antigua and Barbuda.

The only good policies I could find in the United States, by contrast, were food stamp reforms in Maine, Wisconsin, and Kansas.

This year has a depressingly small list of victories. Indeed, the only good thing I had on my initial list was the tax bill. So to make 2017 appear better, I’m turning that victory into three victories.

• A lower corporate tax rate – Dropping the federal corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent will boost investment, wages, and competitiveness, while also pressuring other nations to drop their corporate rates in a virtuous cycle of tax competition. An unambiguous victory.
• Limits on the deductibility of state and local taxes – It would have been preferable to totally abolish the deduction for state and local taxes, but a $10,000 cap will substantially curtail the federal tax subsidy for higher taxes by state and local government. The provision is only temporary, so it’s not an unambiguous win, but the whining and complaining from class-warfare politicians in New York and California is music to my ears.
• No border-adjustment tax – Early in 2017, I was worried that tax reform was going to be tax deform. House Republicans may have had good intentions, but their proposed border-adjustment tax would have set the stage for a value-added tax. I like to think I played at least a small role in killing this bad idea.
• Regulatory Rollback – The other bit of (modest) good news is that the Trump Administration has taken some steps to curtail and limit red tape. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step.

Now let’s look elsewhere in the world for a victory. Once again, there’s not much.

• Macron’s election in France – As I scoured my archives for some good foreign news, the only thing I could find was that a socialist beat a socialist in the French presidential election. But since I have some vague hope that Emanuel Macron will cut red tape and reduce the fiscal burden in France, I’m going to list this as good news. Yes, I’m grading on a curve.

Now let’s look at the bad news.

Last year, my list included growing GOP support for a VAT, eroding support for open trade, and the leftward shift of the Democratic Party.

Here are five examples of policy defeats in 2017.

• Illinois tax increase – If there was a contest for bad state fiscal policy, Illinois would be a strong contender. That was true even before 2017. And now that the state legislature rammed through a big tax increase, Illinois is trying even harder to be the nation’s most uncompetitive state.
• Kansas tax clawback – The big-government wing of the Kansas Republican Party joined forces with Democrats to undo a significant portion of the Brownback tax cuts. Since this was really a fight over whether there would be spending restraint or business-as-usual in Kansas, this was a double defeat.
• Botched Obamacare repeal – After winning numerous elections by promising to repeal Obamacare, Republicans finally got total control of Washington and then proceeded to produce a bill that repealed only portions. And even that effort flopped. This was a very sad confirmation of my Second Theorem of Government.
• Failure to control spending – I pointed out early in the year that it would be easy to cut taxes, control spending, and balance the budget. And I did the same thing late in the year. Unfortunately, there is no desire in Washington to restrain the growth of Leviathan. Sooner or later, this is going to generate very bad economic and political developments.
• Venezuela’s tyrannical regime is still standing – Since I had hoped the awful socialist government would collapse, the fact that nothing has changed in Venezuela counts as bad news. Actually, some things have changed. The economy is getting worse and worse.
• The Export-Import Bank is still alive – With total GOP control of Washington, one would hope this egregious dispenser of corporate welfare would be gone. Sadly, the swamp is winning this battle.

Tomorrow, I’ll do a new version of my annual hopes-and-fears column.

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By Making it Easier to Fire Workers, Macron’s Reforms Will Encourage French Employers to Hire More Workers

I like France, in part because it’s a nice place to visit, but also because I’ve been able to use the country as an example of bad public policy.

• It’s tax system is a nightmare, leading entrepreneurs to escape to other nations (hardly a surprise when tax rates can exceed 100 percent and politicians equate taxes with patriotism!). In some cases, tax rates are so punitive that revenues fall rather than rise.
• The French bureaucratic elite is pampered with costly perks and lavish compensation and the nation’s cossetted political class is famously self serving.
• And the regulatory system is a disaster, which not only hinders economic growth but also contributes to an erosion of social capital as people exploit the system and adopt an entitlement mentality.
• One reason for the bad tax system is that the French government consumes a huge share of economic output. The welfare state is enormous as privileged sectors of the population get expensive handouts.

It’s hard to pick which policy does the most damage. As a fiscal policy wonk, I’m tempted to blame France’s woes on high taxes and wasteful spending.

However, there’s a strong case that labor law is the worst feature of economic policy. France has all sorts of rules that “protect” employees, but the net effect is that workers suffer because these laws discourage entrepreneurs from creating jobs.

And even though I get a lot of mileage out of making France a bad example, I actually hope that the nation’s new government will move policy in the right direction. Indeed, this is why I wanted France’s current President, Emmanuel Macron, to get elected.

Yes, he used to be part of the previous socialist government that sought to make things worse rather than better. But I figured he was most likely to enact some pro-market reforms. And it appears my hopes may be realized, at least with regard to labor policy.

The BBC reports on why Macron wants reform, what he wants to do, and what likely will happen.

President Emmanuel Macron’s government has begun its drive to overhaul France’s rigid labour laws, vowing to “free up the energy of the workforce”. …France has an unemployment rate of 9.5%, double that of the other big European economies and Mr Macron has vowed to cut it to 7% by 2022.

Here’s what he is proposing.

The reforms aim to make it easier for bosses to hire and fire. …France’s labour code is some 3,000 pages long and is seen by many as a straitjacket for business. Among the biggest reforms, individual firms are to be offered more flexibility in negotiating wages and conditions. …If a business reached a deal with the majority of its workforce on working hours and pay that agreement would trump any agreement in the wider industry. …The government wants to facilitate deals at local level by encouraging companies with fewer than 50 employees to set up workers’ committees that can bypass unions. One of the thorniest problems for the government is how to make it easier for companies to dismiss staff. There is to be a cap on damages that can be awarded to workers for unfair dismissal. However, after months of consultations, ministers have agreed to increase the cap from their original proposal. The cap would be limited to three months’ pay for two years of work and 20 months’ pay for 30 years. Until now the minimum pay-out for two years’ employment was six months of salary.

And he’ll probably get what he wants, both because some of the bigger unions have decided to play ball and also because he’s been granted authority to unilaterally make changes.

Protests against the plan are expected next month, but two of the biggest unions say they will not take part. Jean-Claude Mailly, the leader of Force Ouvrière (FO), said that while the reforms were far from perfect, the government had carried out “real consultation” and FO would play no role in demonstrations on 12 September. The union with the biggest presence in the private sector, CFDT, said its members would not take to the streets either, although it was ultimately disappointed that its position was not reflected in the final text. …Mr Macron has already won parliamentary backing to push these reforms through by decree. An opinion poll on Wednesday showed that nine out of 10 French people agreed that their country’s labour code had to be reformed.

Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute has some analysis of what’s been proposed.

…the National Assembly and Senate…authorized France’s government to amend the country’s byzantine labor code by executive orders… Prime Minister Édouard Philippe unveiled the details of the reform, divided into five decrees, on Thursday. So what exactly are they seeking to achieve? Perhaps most important is the introduction of caps on redundancy pay to those whose employment has been terminated without a just cause…stricter caps are introduced for small companies, for which large redundancy payments can be ruinous. It will also become easier for multinational companies to justify termination of employment on economic grounds. …it will be possible to downsize or close down French operations without having to subsidize them first from profits made overseas. …Companies with fewer than 20 employees will not have to rely on labor union representatives for their collective contracts. Subsidiaries of companies will have more freedom to offer temporary work contracts.

Dalibor is not overly impressed by this collection of changes.

…measured by the standards of what France needs, it is not much… The extent to which the reform elicits a strong reaction reflects purely the overregulated status quo, rather than the revolutionary nature of the proposed measures. …the government is doing something right, however timid.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial is a bit more optimistic.

French voters this spring gave themselves their best shot in a generation at reviving their moribund economy, and President Emmanuel Macron is now taking advantage of the opportunity. …the labor-market reforms he unveiled Thursday could remake the eurozone’s second-largest economy. …Mr. Macron will limit the severance payouts courts can mandate for fired workers. He will free small companies with nonunion workers from the straitjacket of national collective-bargaining agreements covering working hours, overtime pay, vacation benefits and the like. Companies will have more scope to negotiate labor deals at the firm level rather than being forced to abide by national agreements.

By reducing the potential cost of employing workers, the reforms will lead to more employment.

The severance overhaul will go a long way toward inducing businesses to hire more workers. Small- and medium-size French companies report pervasive fear of expanding their workforce lest they be stuck with problem employees or face ruinous expenses to lay off workers if economic conditions change.

And France desperately needs reform.

French unemployment is still 9.5% even at its five-year low. That’s double the rate in Germany, and French unemployment has become a social crisis, especially for young people frozen out of the job market. The jobless rate for French between age 15 and 24 is 25%—for those who haven’t moved to London or the U.S.

Though the WSJ does recognize that the reforms are merely a modest step in the right direction.

France isn’t becoming a laissez-faire paradise. Even if Mr. Macron’s labor overhaul takes effect, the French workplace will still be considerably more regulated than America’s.

Let’s close with some excerpts from a story in the New York Times.

…the government announced sweeping changes on Thursday with the potential to radically shift the balance of power from workers to employers. …an invigorated France is considered critical to the survival of a European Union that is finally showing signs of revival after a lost decade. …Economists in France and across Europe expressed optimism about the new law… France has stagnated for years under chronically elevated unemployment and slow growth. The country’s strong worker protections and expensive benefits have been blamed by some for being at least partly at the root of the problem.

Wow, it must be bad if even the NYT is acknowledging that government is causing the economy to stutter.

Amazingly, the story even admits that economic liberalization is the right way to get more job creation.

Germany crossed that Rubicon in the 1990s under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. …Roughly 15 years ago, “France and Germany had economies that were more or less comparable, and that ceased to be the case because the Germans wisely did micro-reforms and the French did not,” said Sebastian Mallaby, senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. So the French ended up with “high unemployment, which fed populism, and getting out of that trap is vital

For what it’s worth, I think the reference to German reforms is key.

Under a left-leaning government, Germany liberalized labor markets. The so-called Hartz reforms were a huge success, slashing the jobless rate by more than 50 percent.

I don’t know whether Macron’s reforms are as bold as what happened in Germany, but any movement in the right direction will create more employment.

P.S. If Macron wants to save France, he better deal with the tax system as well. The problems are nicely captured by two videos, one about how young people are fleeing the nation and another showing a Hollywood celebrity reacting when told about the tax burden.

P.P.S. Whenever I give a speech in France, I ask the audience whether their government (which consumes for the half of economic output) gives them more and better services than the Swiss government (which consumes about one-third of economic output). The answer is always an overwhelmingly no.

P.P.P.S. I (sort of) agreed with Paul Krugman in 2013 that there is a plot against France.

P.P.P.P.S. Last but not least, the French people occasionally do support good policy (and they’re willing to escape to America if things don’t get better).

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Can President Macron Save France?

Back in April, I looked at the candidates running for the French presidency and half-jokingly wondered which one would win the right to preside over the country’s decline.

But once the field was winnowed to two candidates, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, I wrote that voters should pick the socialist over the socialist. My title was sarcastic, but I was making a serious point that Marine Le Pen had a very statist platform, whereas I cited evidence that Macron had some sensible proposals.

Mr. Macron aims to rebalance the economy by cutting 120,000 public sector jobs, streamlining the pension system and dropping state spending back to 52 percent of G.D.P. Mr. Macron leads an emerging centrist consensus that recognizes that…the main obstacle retarding France’s economy is its attachment to a welfare state culture of…generous benefits. …Mr. Macron…once said that stifling taxes threaten to turn France into “Cuba without the sun”.

Indeed, in addition to the reforms listed in the Macron has proposed to lower France’s corporate tax rate to 25 percent, and he also want to liberalize labor markets.

All of which seems rather surreal. After all, Macron was a minister in the failed socialist government of Francois Hollande, so who would have thought that we would be the one to lead an effort to shrink the burden of government?

Yet consider the fiscal agenda President Macron is pushing.

France’s 2018 budget will focus on cutting taxes to boost economic activity as the government seeks to cement its support among the business community, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said. …Philippe told RTL Radio on Wednesday he wants to lower levies that “hurt the competitiveness of our country.” Government ministries this week received letters setting out their spending limits for 2018. President Emmanuel Macron is seeking cuts of 20 billion euros ($23 billion) and tax reductions of 11 billion euros next year… “We have to get out of the spiral of public spending,” government spokesman Christophe Castaner said in a separate interview on France Inter. “France has been addicted to ever increasing spending, paid for by taxes.”

Wow. I wish the Republicans in Washington were as sensible as these French socialists (actually, since they created a new party, it would be more accurate to say they are former socialists).

But there is precedent for this kind of surprise. It was the left-wing parties that started the process of pro-market reforms in Australia and New Zealand. And it was a Social Democrat government in Germany that enacted the labor-market reforms that have been so beneficial for that nation.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that French voters may have buyer’s regret.

The Wall Street Journal recently opined on this topic.

…the question isn’t whether Emmanuel Macron can save France. The question is whether France can save itself. Voters have the best chance in a generation to revive an economy in decline, yet they seem to quail at the critical moment. …voters are having second thoughts about economic reform. Mr. Macron’s approval started falling in July after he announced plans to cut housing benefits—by €5 a month for each recipient. Feminists are in arms over his plan to reduce the government’s women’s-rights budget to €20 million ($23.6 million) from €30 million. That’s before he gets to the labor reforms that will dominate the autumn.

Shifting from the editorial page, the WSJ has a report on the growing opposition to reform.

As Emmanuel Macron sets out to shake up France’s rigid labor market, the young president is losing the public support he may need to weather protests by the country’s powerful unions. …Mr. Macron will have to tread carefully in rolling out his labor reforms in September. For months, the 39-year-old president has been in talks with powerful labor unions in a bid to contain planned street protests. Now the prospect is growing that the ranks of those demonstrations could swell with students, retirees and other segments of French society… Mr. Macron’s government wants to make it easier for French firms to hire and fire workers. …The hard-left General Confederation of Labor, France’s most militant union, is already calling for strikes and demonstrations.

It’s not surprising, of course, to see opposition from those seeking to protect their privileges.

Though it theoretically shouldn’t matter since Macron’s party has a huge majority in the French Assembly.

That being said, politicians do have a habit of buckling when faced with voter unrest.

And Macron is committing some unforced errors, as reported by the U.K.-based Telegraph.

Emmanuel Macron spent €26,000 (£24,000) on makeup during his first three months as president of France, it has emerged. …Le Point reported that his personal makeup artist – referred to only as Natacha M – put in two bills, one for €10,000 and another for €16,000.The Elysee Palace defended the high fee saying: “We called in a contracter as a matter of urgency”. The same makeup artist also applied foundation to Mr Macron during his presidential campaign. Aides said that spending on makeup would be “significantly reduced”. …Le Point put the overall figure for Mr Hollande’s makeup at €30,000 per quarter. Nicolas Sarkozy, meanwhile, paid a whopping €8,000 per month for his, according to Vanity Fair.

Since it appears that these costs are borne by taxpayers, this is all rather depressing.

Macron, however, at least can claim that he’s not the most frivolous with other people’s money. Monsieur Hollande won the prize for waste when you add his hairdresser to the equation.

…all these sums pale into comparison with the £99,000 Mr Hollande paid his personal barber. The huge amount sparked accusations of “shampoo Socialism”. …The hairdresser, Olivier Benhamou, was hired to work at the Elysée Palace in 2012 for the duration of Mr Hollande’s five-year term.  Mr Benhamou also reportedly enjoyed a housing allowance and family benefits.

As I wrote about this last year and suggested that this narcissistic waste made Hollande eligible to win the “Politician of the Year” contest.

But let’s shift back to the serious issue of economic liberalization.

To be blunt, France’s economy is suffocating from statism. I’m not even sure what’s the biggest problem.

• Is it bloated public sector that consumes more than half of the economy’s output?
• Is it a tax system that is so onerous that households sometimes pay more than 100 percent of their income to government?
• Is it cossetted bureaucrats, symbolized by the functionary with a car and driver who nonetheless still racked up giant taxi expenses?
• Is it class-warfare policies that target the rich but wind up hurting the middle class?

The answer is “all of the above,” with is why France desperately needs pro-market reform.

We’ll learn later this year whether Macron can save his country.

P.S. The story that tells you everything you need to know about France was the poll last decade revealing that more than half the population would flee to America if they had the opportunity.

P.P.S. If it wasn’t for France, we never would have had the opportunity to enjoy this very clever and amusing Scott Stantis cartoon.

P.P.P.S. Or watch this rather revealing Will Smith interview about French taxation.

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France, Yachts, and the Real Victims of Class-Warfare Taxation

Remember John Kerry, the former Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator, the guy who routinely advocated higher taxes but then made sure to protect his own wealth? Not only did he protect much of his fortune in so-called tax havens, he even went through the trouble of domiciling his yacht outside of his home state to minimize his tax burden.

I didn’t object to Kerry’s tax avoidance, but I was irked by his hypocrisy. If taxes are supposed to be so wonderful, shouldn’t he have led by example?

At the risk of understatement, folks on the left are not very good about practicing what they preach.

But let’s not dwell on John Kerry. Instead, let’s focus on other yacht owners so we can learn an important lesson about tax policy.

And, as is so often the case, France is an example of the policies to avoid.

Where have all the superyachts gone? That is the question that locals and business owners in the south of France are asking this summer. And the answer appears to be: Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Spain. …While the ongoing presence of €10 cups of coffee and €1000 bottles of Champagne might serve to reassure the casual observer that the region is still as attractive to the sun-loving super-rich as it ever was, appearances can be deceptive. Talk to locals involved in the multibillion-euro yachting sector—and in the south of France that’s nearly everyone, in some trickle-down shape or form, as yachting is by some measures the biggest earner in the region after hotels and wine—and you detect a sinking feeling. …More and more yachting money is draining away…washing up in other European countries such as Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey.

Having once paid the equivalent of $11 for a diet coke in Monaco, I can confirm that it is a painfully expensive region.

But let’s focus on the more important issue: Why are the big yachts staying away from the French Riviera?

Apparently they’re avoiding France for the same reason that entrepreneurs are avoiding France. The tax burden is excessive.

The core reason for the superyacht exodus is financial; France has tightened…tax regulations for the captains and crew members of yachts who officially reside in France, and often have families on the mainland, but traditionally have evaded all tax by claiming they were earning their salary offshore. The country has also taken a hard line on imposing 20 percent VAT on yacht fuel sales, which often used to be dodged. Given that a typical fill can be around €100,000, it is understandable that many captains are simply sailing around the corner.

I don’t share this story because I feel sorry for wealthy people.

Instead, the real lesson to be learned is that when politicians aim at the rich, it’s the rest of us that get victimized.

Ordinary workers, whether at marinas or on board the yachts, are the ones who are losing out.

Revenue at the iconic marina in Saint-Tropez has…fallen by 30 percent since the beginning of the year, while Toulon, a less glamorous destination, has suffered a 40 percent decline. …They stated that refueling a 42-meter yacht in Italy (instead of France) “gives a saving of nearly €21,000 a week because of the difference in tax.” Sales by the four largest marine fuel vendors has fallen by 50 percent this summer, the letter said, adding that French “yachties”—an inexperienced 19-year-old deckhand makes around €2,000 per month and a good Captain can command €300,000—were being laid off in droves, as, due to the new tax rules, national insurance, health and other compulsory contributions which boat owners pay for crew members have increased from 15 to 55 percent of their wages. The letter stated that “the additional cost of maintaining a seven-person crew in France is €300,000 (£268,000) a year.”

All of this is – or should have been – totally predictable.

French tax authorities should have learned from what happened a few years ago in Italy.

Or from what happened in France a few decades ago.

…the French have been down this avenue before. “It happened in France about 30 years ago, so people moved their boats to Italy… Yachting is huge revenue earner for the region. …we contribute huge sums in social security alone. “But the bigger issue is that people holidaying on yachts here go ashore and spend money—and a lot of it.” Says Heslin: “The possibility of this happening if taxes and fees were increased has actually been talked about for the last two years, and everyone warned what would happen. “But this where the French government so often goes wrong, this attitude of, ‘Well, we are France, people will always come here.’” This time, it appears, they have called it wrong. Edmiston says, “Yachting is very important to local economy, but if people are not made to feel welcome here, there are plenty of other places where they will be.”

Incidentally, we have similar examples of counterproductive class warfare in the United States. Florida politicians shot themselves in the foot a number of years ago with high taxes on yachts.

And the luxury tax on yachts, which was part of President George H.W. Bush’s disastrous tax-hike deal in 1990, hurt middle-class boat builders much more than upper-income boat buyers.

But let’s zoom out and make a broader point about public finance and tax policy.

Harsh taxes on yachts backfire because the people being targeted have considerable ability to escape the tax by simply choosing to buy yachts, staff yachts, and sail yachts where taxes aren’t so onerous.

Let’s now apply this insight to something far more important than yachts.

Investment is a key for long-run growth and higher living standards. All economic theories – even Marxism ans socialism – agree that capital formation is necessary to increase productivity and thus boost wages.

Yet people don’t have to save and invest. They can choose to immediately enjoy their earnings, especially if there are harsh taxes on income that is saved and invested.

Or they can choose to (mis)allocate capital in ways that make sense from a tax perspective, but might not be very beneficial for the economy.

And upper-income taxpayers have a lot of latitude over how much of their money is saved and invested, as well as how it is saved and invested.

So when politicians impose high taxes on income that is saved and invested, they can expect big supply-side responses, just as there are big responses when they impose punitive taxes on yachts.

But here’s the bottom line. When they over-tax yachts, the damage isn’t that great. Yes, some local workers are out of jobs, but that tends to be offset by more job creation in other jurisdictions that now have more business from big boats.

Over-taxing saving and investment, by contrast, can permanently lower a nation’s prosperity by reducing capital formation. And to the extent that this policy is imposed on the entire world (which is basically what the OECD is seeking), then there’s no additional growth in other jurisdictions to offset the suffering caused by bad tax policy in one jurisdiction.

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In the French Presidential Election, Voters Should Pick the Socialist over the Socialist

A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed the four major candidates running in the French presidential election and expressed general pessimism.

This Sunday, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen will face each other in the runoff election.

That’s a rather depressing choice. Macron is a former official in the disastrous big-government Hollande Administration and Le Pen is a big-government nativist who wants to preserve the welfare state (though not for immigrants).

Like choosing between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Not encouraging since the country needs a Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher.

A column in the Wall Street Journal explains France’s untenable position.

The deeper question is whether French voters accommodate themselves to reality or cling tighter to their economic illusions. …“The French try to erase historical experience,” Pascal Bruckner tells me. The literary journalist is one of a very few classical liberals among French public intellectuals. He says his compatriots “have forgotten the experience of 1989 and only see the bad aspects of capitalism and liberal democracy.” The tragedy of France, Mr. Bruckner says, is that the country never had a Margaret Thatcher or Gerhard Schröder to implement a dramatic pro-growth program. …it wasn’t shadowy globalists who in 1999 imposed a 35-hour workweek to make overtime labor prohibitively expensive. The law was meant to encourage firms to hire more workers, but like most efforts to subjugate markets to politics, it ended up doing more harm than good. Now it’s the main barrier to hiring in a country where the unemployment rate is stuck north of 10%. Nor was it global markets that levied a corporate tax rate of 33% (plus surcharges for larger firms), a top personal rate of 45%, and a wealth tax and other “social fees” that repelled investors and forced the country’s best and brightest to seek refuge in places like London, New York and Silicon Valley. Nor did globalization build a behemoth French bureaucracy that crowds out the private economy.

Yes, France is in a mess because of statism. Hard to argue with that.

The question is whether Macron or Le Pen will make things better or worse.

With pervasive lack of enthusiasm, I suppose Macron is the preferable choice. There’s at least a chance he’ll be a reformer. Let’s look at how some observers view him.

We’ll start with George Will, who is not overly impressed by Macron.

The French…might confer their presidency on a Gallic Barack Obama. …Emmanuel Macron, 39, is a former Paris investment banker, untainted by electoral experience, and a virtuoso of vagueness. …This self-styled centrist is a former minister for the incumbent president, Socialist François Hollande, who in a recent poll enjoyed 4 percent approval. …In 1977, France’s gross domestic product was about 60 percent larger than Britain’s; today it is smaller than Britain’s. In the interval, Britain had Margaret Thatcher, and France resisted (see above: keeping foreigners’ ideas at bay) “neoliberalism.” It would mean dismantling the heavy-handed state direction of the economy known as “dirigisme,” which is French for sclerosis. France’s unemployment rate is 10 percent, and more than twice that for the young. Public-sector spending is more than 56 percent of France’s GDP, higher than any other European nation’s. Macron promises only to nibble at statism’s ragged edges. He will not receive what he is not seeking — a specific mandate to challenge retirement at age 62 or the 35-hour workweek and the rest of France’s 3,500 pages of labor regulations that make it an ordeal to fire a worker and thus make businesses wary about hiring. Instead, he wants a more muscular European Union , which, with its democracy deficit, embodies regulatory arrogance.

Joseph Sternberg of the Wall Street Journal is a bit more optimistic.

Optimistic pundits hope the impending victory of a fresh-faced reformer signals that France’s economy at last can be fixed. But for at least the past decade, France’s problem hasn’t been a lack of understanding in the political class of what the French economy needs. Mr. Macron is not so much a radical change-agent as a photogenic tribune for a political class that is increasingly, albeit belatedly, uniting behind the need for economic overhauls. Formerly of the center left, he won Sunday’s first round on a revitalization platform different more in degree than in kind from that of the main center-right candidate, François Fillon, on matters such as government spending cuts and labor-law reform. The global case of the vapors over Ms. Le Pen obscures how remarkable this pro-reform convergence is. …Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan…remade British and American politics for a generation not through the workings of their legislative programs but through their capacity to shape public opinion. They created a coalition of the optimistic…. If the Macron program is to stick, he’ll have to do the same. He isn’t off to an auspicious start. …His message to those workers—“Take the hit for the good of the country”—lacks a certain Reaganesque resonance.

A columnist for the New York Times offers the most positive spin, portraying Macron as a Reaganite reformer.

Emmanuel Macron…attributes the nation’s woes not to outsiders — European officials and immigrants — but on France’s own “sclerotic” and unsustainable welfare state. …Mr. Macron would work to slim down one of the world’s fattest welfare states, rather than build it up as Ms. Le Pen would do. Of course France has attempted welfare state reform before, without success. The latest effort came last year, when Mr. Macron was a minister in the Socialist government, and wrote the Macron laws, opening regulated industries to competition. Those plans set off mass protests, and were watered down, but Mr. Macron says there is a big difference now: Earlier governments were not elected with a mandate to downsize the welfare state, while his could be. …the case for change has grown more urgent. …Georges Clemenceau, who served twice as prime minister between 1906 and 1920, cracked that his country was very fertile: “You plant bureaucrats and taxes grow.” Over the last decade state spending has grown even more… It’s tough to say how much state spending is too much, but France has clearly fallen out of balance, and Mr. Macron is right that the trend is “no longer sustainable.” The public payroll is similarly bloated, and Mr. Macron aims to rebalance the economy by cutting 120,000 public sector jobs, streamlining the pension system and dropping state spending back to 52 percent of G.D.P. Mr. Macron leads an emerging centrist consensus that recognizes that — more than immigrants or the euro — the main obstacle retarding France’s economy is its attachment to a welfare state culture of short workweeks and generous benefits. …In recent years France’s high income taxes have been chasing artists, executives and entrepreneurs out of the country. Last year, 12,000 millionaires emigrated — the largest millionaire exodus from any country by far. Mr. Macron — who once said that stifling taxes threaten to turn France into “Cuba without the sun” — has strong support among young, professional urban voters who would prefer opportunity at home to an expat life in London.

I hope this last column is accurate.

And the chance of Macron being good are greater than zero.

After all, it was the left-wing parties that started the process of pro-market reforms in Australia and New Zealand.

And it was a Social Democrat government in Germany that enacted the labor-market reforms that have been so beneficial for that nation.

Heck, policy even moved in the right direction when Bill Clinton was in the White House in the 1990s.

So I guess we can keep our fingers cross that Macron plays a similar role in France.

By the way, I can’t resist citing Paul Krugman’s assessment. He actually thinks France is in fairly good shape.

…what’s going on. …how did things get to this point? …France gets an amazing amount of bad press — much of it coming from ideologues who insist that generous welfare states must have disastrous effects — it’s actually a fairly successful economy. …It’s true that the French over all produce about a quarter less per person then we do — but that’s mainly because they take more vacations and retire younger… France offers a social safety net beyond the wildest dreams of U.S. progressives: guaranteed high-quality health care for all, generous paid leave for new parents, universal pre-K, and much more.

That’s an interesting spin, but maybe French people would like to earn more, but don’t have the opportunity because of bad policy?

And if things are so good in France, why are so many French people escaping to other nations?

Moreover, to the extent there are problems, Krugman says the blame belongs to the supposed pro-austerity crowd in Brussels and Berlin.

Even though Brussels and Berlin were wrong again and again about the economics — even though the austerity they imposed was every bit as economically disastrous as critics warned — they continued to act as if they knew all the answers

Yet the nations that actually cut spending – such as the Baltics – have recovered strongly. It’s the big spenders in Europe who are dragging down the continent.

And since Macron’s supposed reform agenda would only reduce the burden of government spending to 52 percent of economic output (from about 57 percent today), that’s not exactly an example of vigorous budget cutting anyway.

But it would be nice to add France to my list of nations that have – for a last a couple of years – restrained the growth of the public sector.

P.S. I have a good track record in France. The candidate I “endorsed” in 2012 won the race.

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Who Will Prevail in Sunday’s French Presidential Contest and Earn the Right to Preside over the Nation’s Decline?

The last time there was a presidential election in France, I like to think my endorsement made a difference in the outcome.

Now that another election is about to take place, with a first round this Sunday and a runoff election between the top-2 candidates two week later, it’s time to once again pontificate about the political situation in France. But before looking at the major candidates, let’s consider a couple of pieces of economic data to get a sense of the enormous challenges that will have to be overcome to boost France’s anemic economy.

We’ll start with this measure of implicit pension debt (IPD) in various European nations. France, not surprisingly, has made commitments to spend money that greatly exceed the private sector’s capacity to generate tax revenue.

By the way, the accompany article notes that the numbers for France are even worse than suggested by the chart.

Most tax and accounting codes require companies to report such implicit debts on the liability side of the ledger as obligations. Not so with governments, whose accounting practices would under normal circumstances be considered as falsifying public accounts. …According to a recent study, six European countries – Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Poland – have an IPD exceeding 300 percent of gross domestic product. …And the kicker? The data cited above are based on the present value of future pensions as of 2006. More up-to-date figures probably won’t be available until the end of 2017. …The issue is no longer when France goes bankrupt, but when Europe does. The level of debt declared in the national accounts is already worrying. With implicit pension liabilities a multiple of that, it appears that a systemic implosion is unavoidable.

Here’s another sobering visual. France is doing a very good job of scaring off the geese that lay the golden eggs. It is losing more millionaires than any other country.

The combined message of these two visuals is that the already-enormous burden of spending in France will get worse, yet the country is chasing away the people who finance the lion’s share of the government’s budget.

And lots of young entrepreneurs also are escaping, which further exacerbates the nation’s long-run troubles.

Now that we’ve looked at where France is heading, let’s contemplate whether the politicians running for President will make the situation better or worse.

We’ll start with this helpful table summarizing the views of the major candidates (though the hard-left vote apparently has consolidated behind Mélenchon, so Hamon can be ignored).

What’s not captured in this table, however, is that the presidential race pits two outsiders (Mélenchon and Le Pen) against two establishment candidates (Macron and Fillon).

And this is leading to some interesting analysis. The establishment point of view is captured by Sebastian Mallaby’s column in the Washington Post. He is very opposed to Fillon, Le Pen, and Mélenchon, and also rather concerned that his preferred candidate – Emmanuel Macron – won’t make it to the runoff.

In the first round of its presidential election, to be held on Sunday, some three-quarters of the French electorate are expected to back candidates who stand variously for corruption, a 100 percent top tax rate, Islamophobia, Russophilia, Holocaust denial, the undermining of NATO and the traumatic breakup of Europe’s political and monetary union. France was once the cradle of the Western Enlightenment. Now it threatens to become a spectacle of decadent collapse.

I disagree with some of Mallaby’s analysis, but enjoyed his depiction of Mélenchon, who bizarrely thinks Venezuela is a role model.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Communist-allied candidate who styles himself after Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and promises a “citizens’ revolution.” No prizes for guessing that he’s the one who proposes a 100 percent top tax rate… Oblivious to the fact that France has taxed and regulated its way to a 25 percent youth unemployment rate and a government-debt trajectory that threatens Armageddon, he wants further cuts to the French workweek, an additional 10,000 civil servants and a shift in the retirement age from 62 to 60.

To put it in simple terms, Mélenchon is appealing to voters who think Hollande didn’t go far enough.

CNN reports that Mélenchon is even more fixated on class warfare than Bernie Sanders.

Instead of a 90 percent top tax rate, he wants to steal every penny from the supposedly evil rich.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has been endorsed by the French Communist Party, says he would introduce a 100% tax on income above €400,000 ($425,000). …France already has some of the world’s highest rates of income tax, and previous attempts to push them even higher have failed. …Around 10,000 millionaires left the country in 2015, followed by 12,000 last year, according to New World Wealth.

Though maybe he’s the French version of Obama, who also got support from communists.

And, like Obama, he thinks he should get to decide when someone has earned enough money.

“I believe that there is a limit to the accumulation [of wealth],” Mélenchon said in March. “If there are any who want to go abroad, well, goodbye!”

Though at least he has the courage of his convictions. He doesn’t mind if upper-income taxpayers leave. Though I wonder if he’s given any thought to who will then pay the bills?

Anyhow, the 100 percent tax is just one of many crazy ideas.

He also wants to limit pay for CEOs to 20 times the salary of their worst-paid employee. …Here’s a quick look at Mélenchon’s other economic policy proposals: Cut France’s working week to four days…More vacation days for workers…Raise minimum wage by 16%…Increase the tax on inherited wealth…100% renewable energy by 2050…No new free trade agreements…Nationalize French energy company EDF and gas provider Engie.

Now let’s shift to other candidates. I’m irked that Macron generally is portrayed as a centrist and even more irked that Le Pen is portrayed as being on the right.

Prince Michael of Liechtenstein is a very astute observer of European political and economic affairs and his analysis is more accurate. We’ll start with what he wrote about Le Pen’s support for statism.

Ms. Le Pen’s…socialist economic program will continue the ongoing destruction of the French economy, its competitiveness and public finances. …Such a scenario would, however, only accelerate a disaster that was already looming. The present government’s socialist policies, which have shied away from reform and preserved France’s oversized public sector, will eventually bear the same results.

To augment that analysis, Le Pen is considered on the right simply because of her anti-immigrant policy. But on economic policy, she is very much on the left.

Prince Michael also exposed Macron’s support for a more burdensome government.

Mr. Macron…claims that he will bring France’s budget deficit below the European benchmark of 3 percent. …The candidate’s plan…does not appear plausible in light of his intention to further increase government spending. Mr. Macron’s pronouncements indicate an adherence to the Keynesian economic policy approach at the EU level. According to him, Europe should end austerity and introduce a growth model in which additional spending – on top of the already lavish outlays planned by European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker – ought to be implemented. The Macron policies boil down to more state and more EU centralization. At the heart of the scheme is the creation of a European Ministry of Finance and Economy, an all-powerful body to plan and monitor the EU economy. …Macron intends to continue treating the French cancer with aspirin and transmit the disease to Germany and the rest of the EU, while demanding that they pay for France’s subsistence in the meantime.

In other words, Macron wants this cartoon to be official French policy. Yet some people actually think of him as a pro-market reformer. Wow.

Let’s conclude with these wise words from an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal, which is very worried that the runoff may feature two pro-big government outsiders.

All four major candidates are polling at around 20%, but Mr. Mélenchon has momentum and the highest personal favorability. A Le Pen-Mélenchon finale would be a political shock to markets and perhaps to the future of the EU and eurozone. …Mr. Hollande’s Socialists have made France the sickest of Europe’s large economies, with growth of merely 1.1% in 2016, a jobless rate above 10% for most of the past five years, and youth unemployment at nearly 25%. His predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy and the Republicans talked a good reform game but never delivered. …the stage is set for candidates who appeal to nativism or a cost-free welfare state. Let’s hope a French majority steps back from the political brink.

By the way, it’s not yet time for me to make an official endorsement, though I’ll share my leanings.

I confess that I’m torn between Fillon and Mélenchon. By French standards, Fillon is apparently very pro-free market. So I should like him. He could be the Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher of France.

But what if he turns out to be another Sarkozy, a big-government fraud?

If I support Mélenchon, by contrast, at least I can say with great confidence that I will be able to continue using France as an example of bad public policy. I realize that’s not an ideal outcome for the French people, but you know what they say about omelets and eggs.

In any event, I’ll wait until the runoff election before selecting a candidate.

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In One Story, Everything You Need to Know about France

What best symbolizes France’s statist political culture?

• Is it bloated public sector that consumes more than half of the economy’s output?
• Is it a tax system that is so onerous that households sometimes pay more than 100 percent of their income to government?
• Is it cossetted bureaucrats with cars and drivers who nonetheless still rack up giant taxi expenses?

Those are good examples, to be sure, but I’ve actually already shared an everything-you-need-to-know story dealing with lavish perks for France’s protected bureaucrat class.

But there’s no rule that says I can’t have multiple everything-you-need-to-know anecdotes.

Here’s a story that reveals why France is in trouble. The Wall Street Journal reports that a French presidential candidate is arguing people shouldn’t get upset that he used taxpayer money to give his wife a no-show job because a big chunk of the money then went back to the government because of punitive taxes.

François Fillon…apologiz[ed] to the country for having employed his wife and children as parliamentary aides while rejecting accusations the jobs were phony. …Mr. Fillon characterized it as unfair for media reports to state his wife received nearly a million euros over a 15-year period, saying after taxes her monthly average income came to only €3,677 ($3,964). …The privileges traditionally available to France’s ruling class were exposed with rare candor.

So I guess Fillon wants people to think it’s okay to divert funds to family members if they “only” pocket about $48,000 per year after paying taxes.

This is disgusting. At least Fillon should have wasted taxpayer money more elegantly, like France’s current president, who doesn’t have much hair but still gave his stylist big bucks.

What makes Fillon’s story especially amusing is that he is the candidate trying to appeal to French voters who want to reduce the role of the state.

Considering that two of his major opponents are Marine Le Pen, a big-government populist, and Benoît Hamon, a socialist who favors a taxpayer-provided basic income for everyone, maybe Fillon actually is the only choice for French voters with libertarian impulses, but that’s a rather sad commentary on the state of French politics. So I don’t even know if I’ll endorse a candidate, like I did back in 2012.

What makes the situation particularly tragic is that the fiscal mess in France has become so bad that even parts of the government are concluding that some market-based reforms are necessary.

Corporation tax in France is too far above the European average, according to a report by the French Court of Auditors. The experts said a cut from 33.3% to 25% would allow companies to compete with their European counterparts. EurActiv France reports. The amount of tax paid by businesses in France has been steadily climbing for the last two decades. Today, they pay the highest rates in Europe. But this growth has not been good for the country, according to a report published by the Court… France has not always been a high tax jurisdiction, compared to other EU countries. In 1995 it was more or less at the European average. But it has steadily increased over the last 20 years. At the same time, other EU member states have been moving in the opposite direction. According to the report, most member states have lowered tax on business revenues, or have imminent plans to do so. The UK, for example plans to cut corporation tax to 17% by 2020. The average tax rate paid by EU companies fell from 33% in 1999 to 25% in 2015.

France’s suicidal fiscal regime is why – with my tongue planted firmly in cheek – I agreed with Paul Krugman back in 2013 that there is a plot against France. But I pointed out the conspirators against France were the nation’s politicians.

P.S. Actually, perhaps the story that tells you everything you need to know about France was the poll last decade revealing that more than half the population would flee to America if they had the opportunity.

P.P.S. If it wasn’t for France, we never would have had the opportunity to enjoy this very clever and amusing Scott Stantis cartoon.

P.P.P.S. Or watch this rather revealing Will Smith interview about French taxation.

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Hold the Presses: We Have a New Contestant for Politician of the Year!

Two months ago, I decided that the new President of the Philippines was the winner of the 2016 award for politician of the year.

It takes a remarkable amount of chutzpah, after all, to freely admit to having mistresses (yes, more than one). But the icing on the cake is that he then bragged that none of them are on the public payroll. I imagine Filipino taxpayers are very grateful that he self-finances his extracurricular activity.

This is all quite noteworthy, but I may have jumped the gun when giving President Duterte this award.

That’s because we now have another politician who has gone above and beyond the call of duty. This politician, you will see, has displayed a stunning degree of arrogance and elitism, acting as if the normal rules of decorum and prudence don’t apply.

No, I’m not talking about Hillary Clinton getting a free pass for endangering national security. Though that would be a good guess.

Instead, our new contestant for politician of the year is Monsieur Francois Hollande.

And the reason he has vaulted into contention is this amusing story (though presumably very aggravating story for French taxpayers) about the elitist and wasteful habits of France’s socialist leader.

French President François Hollande’s hairdresser earns a gross salary of €9,895 a month, according to a report in French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, to be published Wednesday. …Over the course of the president’s mandate, which ends next year, the hairdresser will have received a gross salary of more than €590,000. The hairdresser regularly follows Hollande during his travels, according to Le Canard.

I realize I may be a bit old fashioned, and maybe my reactions are influenced by my minimalist approach to hair care (shower, comb with fingers, done), but why does a male politician need an on-staff hairdresser?!?

Especially when he doesn’t have that much hair to begin with!

By the way, it’s not 100 percent clear that taxpayer money is financing Hollande’s hairdresser, though I suspect that’s almost certainly the case. The article mentions that the hairdresser signed the contract with Hollande’s top staffer, which certainly makes it sound as if the French President isn’t spending his own money.

Though maybe the Socialist Party or some other entity is paying the bills, so I will leave open the possibility that Hollande is merely guilty of being a vain clown instead of being a vain clown who wastes taxpayer money.

What makes this story particularly interesting is that Hollande a few years ago publicly cut back on some of the lavish perks he and his cabinet were enjoying. But I guess that was all for show.

Though I’d actually consider it a bargain if politicians spent all their time preening in front of the mirror.

That would leave them less time to tax our earnings.

Or regulate our behavior.

And discourage our productivity.

Or corrupt our nation.

And they’d have less time to reward their donors at our expense!

Or to reward themselves.

Or to be disingenuous hypocrites.

But no need to belabor the point. Maybe now it’s easy to understand why I prefer “do-nothing” politicians.

Heck, I’d be willing to double their pay if they promised to stay home.

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The Productive People in France Need a Frexit

The United Kingdom is getting a lot of attention because voters just chose to leave the European Union.

I think this was the smart choice. Yes, there will be some short-run economic volatility, but the long-run benefits should make it worthwhile. Sort of like chemotherapy being painful, but still being much better than the alternative of cancer.

My main argument for Brexit was that the European Union is a sinking ship. The continent is in trouble because the bureaucrats in Brussels reflexively support centralization, bureaucratization, and harmonization. And it’s in trouble because most member governments support dirigiste policies on the national level.

Consider France. The country is so statist that even some folks from the establishment media have warned that government has too much power. Heck, even some of the people at the European Commission have complained that taxes are too high.

Perhaps most miraculously, there was even a column in the New York Times last month explaining how bad government policy is killing France’s job market.

It’s obvious that the current system isn’t working. …business owners are reluctant to hire employees, because it’s so complicated and expensive to fire them when times are bad. …times are pretty bad: France has 10 percent unemployment, roughly twice the levels in Germany and Britain. For young people, it’s around 24 percent. …While many other European countries have revamped their workplace rules, France has barely budged.

The most important thing to understand is that employers are extremely reluctant to hire full-time workers because it’s nearly impossible to fire them if they don’t do a good job or if the company hits hard times. And that translates into temporary jobs combined with lots of unemployment.

The Hollande government has proposed to tinker with this system.

The new labor bill — weakened after long negotiations — wouldn’t alter the bifurcated system, in which workers either get a permanent contract called a “contrat à durée indéterminée,” known as a C.D.I., or a short-term contract that can be renewed only once or twice. Almost all new jobs have the latter.

But even though the reforms are very timid, the French are protesting.

…it isn’t just unions that oppose the bill. So do more than 60 percent of the population, who fear the bill would strip workers of protections without fixing the problem. Young people took to the streets to oppose it, demanding C.D.I.s, too. Why are the French so wedded to a failing system? …they believe that a job is a basic right — guaranteed in the preamble to their Constitution — and that making it easier to fire people is an affront to that. Without a C.D.I., you’re considered naked before the indifferent forces of capitalism. …young protesters held a banner warning that they were the “génération précaire.”

Here’s the most amazing part of the story. The protesters think that a government-protected job is a rite of passage into adulthood. They want the “right to grow up,” even though their version of adulthood involves complete blindness to economic reality.

They were agitating for the right to grow up. …getting a permanent work contract is a rite of adulthood. Without one, it’s hard to get a mortgage or car loan, or rent an apartment. Mainstream economic arguments can’t compete. “Basic facts of economic science are completely dismissed,” said Étienne Wasmer, a labor economist at Sciences Po. “People don’t see that if you let employers take risks, they’ll hire more people.” Instead, many French people view the workplace as a zero-sum battle between workers and bosses.

The obvious answer is to dramatically reduce government intervention in labor markets. But since that’s a near impossibility in France, high levels of joblessness almost surely will continue and short-term employment contracts will be the norm for those who do manage to find work.

By the way, the system doesn’t even work that well for the workers with the government-protected positions.

Many workers here have permanent contracts that make it very hard to fire them. So some companies resort to an illegal strategy: They try to make someone so miserable, he’ll quit. “What happens next is, I’ll lose my team and my staff, and therefore I’ll have nothing to do,” the man predicted. “You still have to come to work every day, but you have no idea why.” …those lucky enough to have C.D.I.s can struggle at work. In one study, workers with C.D.I.s reported more stress than those with short-term contracts, in part because they felt trapped in their jobs. After all, where else would they get another permanent contract?

No wonder so many people in France want to work for the government. That way they can get lavish pay and benefits with very little pressure to perform.

In any case, the net result is that the French economy is stagnant. Potentially valuable labor (one of the two factors of production) is being sidelined or misallocated.

Writing for Market Watch, Diana Furchtgott-Roth shares her analysis of crazy French labor law.

…reforms are vital because the French economy is stagnant. GDP growth for the latest quarter was 0.6%. Over the past decade, growth has rarely risen above 1%. The unemployment rate is over 10% and the youth unemployment is 25%. Clearly tax and regulatory reform, including more labor flexibility, are needed to encourage employers to hire. …a French court this week ruled that Société Générale rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel, who lost $5.5 billion of the bank’s assets in 2008 and almost caused its bankruptcy, had been unfairly dismissed. Société Générale was ordered to pay Kerviel $511,000 because it decided he was dismissed “without cause.” …When employers cannot fire workers, they are less likely to hire them, leading to a sclerotic labor market and high unemployment. This is what the left-wing Hollande is trying to repair. …Some view France as a worker’s paradise where the government protects workers from abusive employers. The reality is that France is a worker’s nightmare where jobs are scarce and work ethic is prohibited by law.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is even more negative in his column for the U.K.-based Telegraph.

An intractable economic crisis has been eating away at the legitimacy of the French governing elites for much of this decade. This has now combined with a collapse in the credibility of the government, and mounting anger… The revolt comes as Paris battles a wave of protest against labour reform, a push that has come close to rupturing the Socialist Party. The measures were rammed through by decree to avoid a vote. Scenes of guerrilla warfare with police on French streets have been a public relations disaster… Rail workers are demanding a maximum 32-hour week. Eric Dor from the IESEG School of Management in Lille says powerful vested interests have made France almost unreformable. …Dor said the labour reforms have been watered down and are a far cry from the Hartz IV laws in Germany in 2004, which made it easier to fire workers and screw down wages.

He points out that the damage of labor-market intervention is exacerbated by a wretched tax system (I’ve written that the national sport of France is taxation rather than soccer).

France’s social model is funded by punitively high taxes on labour. The unintended effect is to create a destructive ‘tax wedge’ that makes it too costly to hire new workers. It protects incumbents but penalizes outsiders, leading to a blighted banlieu culture of mass youth unemployment. There are 360 separate taxes, with 470 tax loopholes. The labour code has tripled… Public spending is 57pc of GDP, a Nordic level without Danish or Swedish levels of labour flexibility. Unemployment is still 10.2pc even at this late stage of the global cycle.

Given the various ways that government discourages employment, is anyone surprised that the French work less than any other nation in Europe? Here’s a blurb from a report in the EU Observer.

French put in the least working hours in the EU, according to the bloc’s statistical office Eurostat. Full-time workers in France clocked up 1,646 hours of labour last year.

By the way, there’s a tiny possibility of change.

There’s an election next year and one of the candidates has a platform that sounds vaguely like he wants to be the Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher of France.

Here are some of the details from a report by Reuters.

French presidential hopeful Alain Juppe, the frontrunner in opinion polls 20 years after serving as a deeply unpopular prime minister, said on Tuesday he would roll back France’s iconic 35-hour working week and scrap a wealth tax if elected next year. In the mid-1990s Juppe triggered France’s worst unrest in decades because he would not budge on pension reforms. He eventually had to drop them after weeks of strikes and protests. …”The French are being kept from working by excessive labor costs. I want to cut those costs,” Juppe told hundreds of supporters as he outlined his economic platform. …Juppe said he would raise the retirement age to 65 from 62 while cutting both taxes and state spending. Juppe said he would aim to cut public spending by 80-100 billion euros over five years and to reduce payroll taxes by 10 billion euros and corporate taxes by 11 billion euros. …Juppe also said he would cap welfare subsidies.

Amazingly, Juppe is the favorite according to the polling data.

So maybe French voters finally realize (notwithstanding the bad advice of Paul Krugman) that becoming another Greece isn’t a good idea.

P.S. My “Frexit” title simply recognizes the reality – as shown in this video – that productive people already are fleeing France. Hollande’s punitive tax policy has driven many of them to other nations. French entrepreneurs in particular have flocked to London.

P.P.S. Watch Will Smith’s reaction after being told France has a top tax rate of 75 percent.

P.P.P.S. France’s effective tax rate actually climbed to more than 100 percent, though Hollande mercifully decided that taxpayers now should never have to pay more than 80 percent of their income to government.

P.P.P.P.S. The big puzzle is why the French put up with so much statism. Polling data from both 2010 and 2013 shows strong support for smaller government, and an astounding 52 percent of French citizens said they would consider moving to the United States if they got the opportunity. So why, then, have they elected statists such as Sarkozy and Hollande?!?

P.P.P.P.P.S. In my humble opinion, the most powerful comparison is between France and Switzerland.

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From Ironic to Asinine: Global Gun Control Developments

I recently wrote about gun control, noting how there’s less murder in demographically similar U.S. states than there is in matching Canadian provinces.

This is one of the reasons why I’m optimistic about protecting the Second Amendment. The empirical evidence is so strong that law-abiding people are safer in well-armed societies.

But let’s see how the rest of the world is faring on this issue.

Let’s start with a story from Switzerland, a nation that has a very strong tradition of gun rights.

Switzerland is becoming safer. Police recently flagged up that crime rates fell by 7% in 2015, reaching a seven-year low. In 2014, homicide was actually at its lowest level in 30 years. …A survey by swissinfo.ch shows gun permit applications were up almost everywhere in Switzerland in 2015.

Hmmm…, more guns and less crime. The person who slapped the headline on the story seems to think it’s a mystery why that relationship exists.

But anybody capable of passing my IQ test for criminals and liberals understands that the title should be changed to “Lower crime because Swiss have more guns” or something like that.

The article also includes a section on Switzerland’s gun culture.

Switzerland has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world because of its militia army. The defence ministry estimates that some two million guns are in private hands in a population of 8.3 million. An estimated 750,000 of those guns have been recorded in a local register. Under the militia system soldiers keep their army-issue weapons at home. Voters in recent years have rejected tighter gun controls. In 2011, voters rejected a proposal to restrict access to guns by banning the purchase of automatic weapons and introducing a licensing system for the use of firearms.

Ah, those sensible Swiss voters. Not only are they against tax hikes and regulatory intervention, but they also reject licensing and support the right to purchase automatic weapons.

Now let’s travel Down Under and see what happens when a government takes the wrong approach to guns.

Hillary Clinton says “Australia is a good example”… The man Clinton wants to succeed, Barack Obama, noted, “Australia … imposed very severe, tough gun laws.  And they haven’t had a mass shooting since.” …Maybe it’s time to tell the president and his likely successor that the policies they so admire have been largely flouted… Clinton and Obama tout a 1996 “gun buyback” that was actually a compensated confiscation of self-loading rifles, self-loading shotguns, and pump-action shotguns in response to the Port Arthur mass shooting. The seizure took around 650,000 firearms out of civilian hands and tightened the rules on legal acquisition and ownership of weapons going forward. …What the law couldn’t do—what prohibitions can never accomplish—was eliminate demand for what was forbidden. …The Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia estimates compliance with the “buyback” at 19 percent. Other researchers agree. In a white paper on the results of gun control efforts around the world, Franz Csaszar, a professor of criminology at the University of Vienna, Austria, gives examples of large-scale non-compliance with the ban. He points out, “In Australia it is estimated that only about 20% of all banned self-loading rifles have been given up to the authorities.”

There is one group benefiting from the attempted gun ban. Criminal gangs are big winners.

“Australians may be more at risk from gun crime than ever before with the country’s underground market for firearms ballooning in the past decade,” the report added. “[T]he national ban on semi-automatic weapons following the Port Arthur massacre had spawned criminal demand for handguns.” …Once you enable organized crime, there are no boundaries. Australia’s criminal gangs supply not just pistols, but weapons up to and including rocket launchers—some of which may have ended up in terrorist hands. …like American bootleggers who supplemented smuggled booze with bathtub gin, Australia’s organized criminal outfits have learned the joy of DIY production. …Australia will have to live with the rise in organized crime for years to come.

Such a disappointment that Australia, which is a role model on some issues, is so anti-civil rights when it comes to guns.

Now let’s travel to France, where there are at least one person doesn’t think it’s a good idea to let terrorists be the only ones with guns.

The leader of the rock band playing the Bataclan in Paris the night ISIS terrorists killed 90 in the concert hall three months ago ripped French gun control laws and urged “everybody” to get a gun. “I can’t let the bad guys win,” said Jesse Hughes of Eagles of Death Metal. …Speaking in a sometimes tearful interview to iTele, Hughes added, “Did your French gun control stop a single fu—– person from dying at the Bataclan? And if anyone can answer yes, I’d like to hear it, because I don’t think so.”

Amen. It’s downright bizarre that European politicians think it’s a good idea for citizens to be disarmed while crazies get to stock up on weapons.

Now let’s turn to America, where New Jersey (again) is a national embarrassment.

A New Jersey actor faces 10 years in prison for firing a prop pellet gun while filming an independent film. Carlo Goias, who uses the stage name Carlo Bellario, was charged with firing the fake gun without a state gun permit as part of the Garden State’s insanely strict gun laws. In New Jersey, all guns require a state permit, even non-lethal airsoft guns like the one Goias was using. …just seeing Goias pretending to fire from a car window prompted neighborhood residents to call the police. “I pretended to shoot out the window; they were going to dub in the sound later,” Goias told the Associated Press. “We get back, and within a couple of minutes we’re surrounded by cop cars.” …being sent away for 10 years over a fake gun is a reminder of just how absurd New Jersey’s gun laws still are.

Speaking of gun control, here’s radio shock jock Howard Stern making mostly sensible comments on the right to keep and bear arms.

It’s a bit disappointing that he supports a national gun registry, but I assume that’s because he doesn’t realize that the left supports registration primarily as a predicate for gun confiscation.

But he atones for that error by mocking leftists who have personal (and well-armed) security guards. Gee, I wonder if we might have an example of such a person.

And it’s also good that Howard mentions that most cops support gun rights, something that we see in the polling data.

P.S. Click here and here for some good gun control humor.

P.P.S. And click here for some entertaining videos mocking gun control.

P.P.P.S. Even some leftists have seen the light on gun rights, as you can see here, here, and here.

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Europe’s Moral Bankruptcy

I wrote last year about the moral vacuum that exists in Europe because gun control laws in nations like France make it very difficult for Jews to protect themselves from barbaric attacks.

But the principle applies more broadly. All law-abiding people should have the human right to protect themselves.

Politicians in Denmark don’t seem to understand this principle. Or maybe the do understand the principle, but they are so morally bankrupt that don’t care. Not only do they have gun control, they even have laws against pepper spray. And they are so fanatical in their desire to turn people into sheep that the government apparently will prosecute a girl who used pepper spray to save herself from rape.

Here are some excerpts from a report in the U.K.-based Daily Mail.

A Danish teenager who was sexually assaulted near a migrant asylum centre has been told she will be prosecuted after using pepper spray to fend off her attacker. …she managed to prevent the man from attacking her further by spraying the substance at him. …However, as it is illegal to use pepper spray, the teenage girl is set to face charges.

How disgusting.

And what makes the situation especially frustrating is that the criminals and terrorists in Europe obviously don’t have any problem obtaining firearms.

So the only practical effect of gun control (or bans on pepper spray) is to make life easier for the scum of society.

And the real insult to injury is that a teenage girl who should be hailed as a hero now faces the threat of punishment. Just like the unfortunate British woman who was persecuted for using a knife to deter some thugs.

And here’s some of what the BBC reported about

Italian hospitality for the visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has stretched to covering up nude statues. Italy also chose not to serve wine at official meals

Pathetic. Particularly since the Italians bent over backwards for a truly heinous regime.

Kudos to President Hollande in France, by contrast. The Daily Mail notes that he held firm.

A lunch between the French and Iranian presidents in Paris was scrapped today because France refused to remove wine from the menu.

By the way, there clearly is a role for common courtesy and diplomatic protocol. It obviously would be gratuitously rude for a nation to serve pork at a dinner for officials from Israel or any Muslim nation, just as it would inappropriate and insensitive to serve beef for an event for officials from India.

Moreover, officials from one nation should not make over-the-top demands when visiting other countries. Just as it would be wrong for French officials to demand wine at state dinners in Iran, it’s also wrong for Iranian officials to demand the absence of wine at meals in France. After all, it’s not as if they would be expected to partake.

In the grand scheme of things, though, the kerfuffle about wine and statues doesn’t matter compared to the potentially life-and-death issue of whether Europeans should be allowed to defend themselves.

That’s why Europe isn’t merely in trouble because of fiscal bankruptcy, but also because of moral bankruptcy.

P.S. While having the ability to protect your life or to guard against rape isn’t a human right in most European nations, take a look at some of the things that are “rights.”

• A committee from the Council of Europe claims there is a right to other people’s money.
• Across Europe, a satellite dish is now a human right.
• In Finland, broadband access is a basic right.
• In France, it is against the law to say your husband is under-endowed or that your wife is fat.
• There’s now an entitlement for free soccer broadcasts in Europe.
• In Italy, you have the right to…um…your testicles.

All this is amusing…in a very sad way.

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French President Approaches Cliff, Steps on Accelerator

When I wrote back in 2012 that France was committing fiscal suicide, I should have guessed that President Hollande would get impatient and push for even more statism.

Sure enough, the BBC reports that France’s President has a new plan. The ostensible goal is to reduce unemployment, but the practical effect is to expand the size and scope of government.

President Francois Hollande has set out a €2bn (£1.5bn) job creation plan in an attempt to lift France out of what he called a state of “economic emergency”. Under a two-year scheme, firms with fewer than 250 staff will get subsidies if they take on a young or unemployed person for six months or more. In addition, about 500,000 vocational training schemes will be created.

Needless to say, if subsidies and handouts were the key to job creation, France already would have full employment.

In reality, real jobs are created when employers think that new employees will produce profits. But that’s a difficult hurdle in a country like France.

Though, in the interest of fairness, I should acknowledge that Hollande claims this plan will not involve a net increase in the burden of government spending.

Mr Hollande said money for the plan would come from savings in other areas of public spending. “These €2bn will be financed without any new taxes of any kind,” said President Hollande, who announced the details during an annual speech to business leaders.

Though I suspect that this claim is about as believable as Obama’s laughable assertion that government-run healthcare would lower premiums and allow people to keep their health plans.

But the strangest part of the BBC story involves Hollande’s contortions on labor market policy. See if you can decipher this passage.

The president also addressed the issue of labour market flexibility. “Regarding the rules for hiring and laying off, we need to guarantee stability and predictability to both employers and employees. There is room for simplification,” he said. “The goal is also more security for the company to hire, to adapt its workforce when economic circumstances require, but also more security for the employee in the face of change and mobility”.

I gather Hollande wants people to believe he has some sort of magic wand that will magically give companies flexibility while also guaranteeing workers stability.

Put me in the skeptical column. I would be stunned if France actually liberalized its calcified labor markets. The unions are too powerful and too shortsighted to realize that employers will always be reluctant to hire unless they know they have the ability to fire.

Besides, why would unemployed people, particularly those with low skill levels, want jobs when redistribution programs make idleness comparatively attractive?

Meanwhile, those with high skills will continue to escape the country.

So the bottom line is that France’s slow-motion economic suicide will continue. Hollande’s foolish policies simply mean the day of reckoning will come a bit sooner.

Let’s close with something that’s both revealing and amusing. One of America’s movie stars, Will Smith, had a very interesting wake-up moment on French TV.

I wonder what Mr. Smith would say if he knew that some French taxpayers actually have faced tax burdens of more than 100 percent (though Hollande, with his infinite mercy, then decided that the upper limit should be 80 percent).

P.S. My friend Veronique de Rugy (an escapee from France) warns Americans about the dangers of adopting the policies of her former country in this video.

P.P.S. Sadly, American statists have been urging European-type statism in the United States for decades. To see where that leads, check out these cartoons from Michael Ramirez, Glenn Foden, Eric Allie and Chip Bok.

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A Supranational Eurozone Government: Bad for Europe, Really Bad for Germany

If you want to pinpoint the leading source of bad economic policy proposals, I would understand if someone suggested the Obama Administration.

But looking to Europe might be even more accurate.

For instance, I’d be hard pressed to identify a policy more misguided than continent-wide eurobonds, which I suggested would be akin to “co-signing a loan for your unemployed alcoholic cousin who has a gambling addiction.”

And now there’s another really foolish idea percolating on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The U.K.-based Financial Times has a story about calls for greater European centralization from Italy.

Italy’s finance minister has called for deeper eurozone integration in the aftermath of the Greek crisis, saying a move “straight towards political union” is the only way to ensure the survival of the common currency. …Italy and France have traditionally been among the most forceful backers of deeper European integration but other countries are sceptical about supporting a greater degree of political convergence. …Italy is calling for a wide set of measures — including the swift completion of banking union, the establishment of a common eurozone budget and the launch of a common unemployment insurance scheme — to reinforce the common currency. He said an elected eurozone parliament alongside the existing European Parliament and a European finance minister should also be considered. “To have a full-fledged economic and monetary union, you need a fiscal union and you need a fiscal policy,” Mr Padoan said.

This is nonsense.

The United States has a monetary union and an economic union, yet our fiscal policy was very decentralized for much of our nation’s history.

And Switzerland has a monetary and economic union, and its fiscal policy is still very decentralized.

Heck, the evidence is very strong that decentralized fiscal systems lead to much better outcomes.

So why is Europe’s political elite so enamored with a fiscal union and so opposed to genuine federalism?

There’s an ideological reason and a practical reason for this bias.

The ideological reason is that statists strongly prefer one-size-fits-all systems because government has more power and there’s no jurisdictional competition (which they view as a “race to the bottom“).

The practical reason is that politicians from the weaker European nations see a fiscal union as a way of getting more transfers and redistribution from nations such as Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands.

In the case of Italy, both reasons probably apply. Government debt already is very high in Italy and growth is virtually nonexistent, so it’s presumably just a matter of time before the Italians will be looking for Greek-style bailouts.

But the Italian political elite also has a statist ideological perspective. And the best evidence for that is the fact that Signore Padoan used to be a senior bureaucrat at the Paris-based OECD.

The Italian finance minister…served as former chief economist of the OECD.

You won’t be surprised to learn that French politicians also have been urging a supranational government for the eurozone. And presumably for the same reasons of ideology and self-interest.

But here’s the man-bites-dog part of the story.

The German government also seems open to the idea, as reported by the U.K.-based Independent.

France and Germany have agreed a new plan for closer eurozone political union… The new Franco-German agreement would see closer cooperation between the 19 countries.

Wow, don’t the politicians in Berlin know that a fiscal union is just a scheme to extract more money from German taxpayers?!?

As I wrote three years ago, this approach “would involve putting German taxpayers at risk for the reckless fiscal policies in nations such as Greece, Italy, and Spain.“

But maybe the Germans aren’t completely insane. Writing for Bloomberg, Leonid Bershidsky explains that the current German position is to have a supranational authority with the power to reject national budgets.

The German perspective on a political and fiscal union is a little more cautious. Last year, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and a fellow high-ranking member of the CDU party, Karl Lamers, called for a euro zone parliament (not elected, but comprising European Parliament members from euro area countries) and a budget commissioner with the power to reject national budgets if they contravene a certain set of rules agreed by euro members.

And since the German approach is disliked by the Greeks, then it can’t be all bad.

Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, Schaeuble’s most eloquent hater, pointed out in a recent article for Germany’s Die Zeit that, in the Schaeuble-Lamers plan, the budget commissioner is endowed only with “negative” powers, while a true federation — like Germany itself — elects a parliament and a government to formulate positive policies.

But “can’t be all bad” isn’t the same as good.

Simply stated, any sort of eurozone government almost surely will morph over time into a transfer union. And that means more handouts, more subsidies, more harmonization, more bailouts, more centralization, and more bureaucracy.

So you can see why Europe’s political elite may be even more foolish than their American counterparts.

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While Greece Implodes, France Corrodes and Spain Erodes

For understandable reasons, the fiscal mess in Greece has dominated the European economic headlines.

But there are other developments that deserve attention. Amazingly, some politicians think Europe’s stagnant economy can be improved with more harmonization, more bureaucratization, and more centralization.

The EU Observer has a story about a French scheme to transform the eurozone into a supranational government.

French president Francois Hollande has called for a stronger more harmonised eurozone… “What threatens us is not too much Europe, but too little Europe,” he said in a letter published in the Journal du Dimanche. He called for a vanguard of countries that would lead the eurozone, which should have its own government, a “specific budget” and its own parliament. …French prime minister Manuel Valls Sunday said…France would prepare “concrete proposals” in the coming weeks. “We must learn the lessons and go much further,” he added, referring to the Greek crisis.

I’m not sure what lessons Monsieur Valls wants people to learn. Greece got in trouble because of big government and excessive intervention.

So why is anyone supposed to believe that adding a new layer of government is going to make Europe more prosperous?

In all likelihood, the French are pursuing this agenda for two selfish reasons.

1. A “harmonised eurozone” means that all affected nations would have to abide by the same rules, and that inevitably means taxes and regulations are set at the most onerous levels. The French think that’s a good idea because it’s a way of undermining the competitiveness of other eurozone nations.
2. A eurozone government with a “specific budget” sets the stage for more intergovernmental transfers in Europe. The French think that’s a good idea since they presumably could prop up their decrepit welfare state with money from taxpayers in nations such as Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands.

By the way,not all French politicians are totally misguided.

At least one of them is expressing more sensible ideas, as reported by the U.K.-based Telegraph.

France is “the sick man of Europe”, François Fillon, the former centre-Right prime minister, has said in an open letter to French president Francois Hollande, calling for urgent economic reforms.“The Greek tragedy shows that the threat of bankruptcy is not abstract,” according to Mr Fillon… French commentators writing about the Greek crisis in recent days have pointed out that France’s own national debt of more than €2 trillion (£1.4 trillion), amounting to 97.5 per cent of GDP, places it in the same league as Spain and other southern European countries.

By the way, the commentators who are fretting about French debt are focused on the wrong variable. The French disease is big government. High levels of debt are simply a symptom of that disease.

Moreover, I’m not sure that Monsieur Fillon is a credible spokesman for smaller government and free markets since he served during the statist tenure of President Sarkozy.

In any event, if there are any serious reformers in France, they face an uphill battle. As I’ve previously noted, many successful people and aspiring entrepreneurs have left France.

Here’s a news report on the phenomenon.

And just in case you think this is merely anecdotal data, here’s a table showing the nations that lost the most millionaires since 2000.

In the case of China and India, rich people leave because they want to establish a domicile in a developed nation.

But successful people escape France in spite of its first-world attributes.

Let’s now cross the Pyrenees and see what’s happening in Spain.

Our Keynesian friends, as well as other big spenders, are always trumpeting the value of infrastructure projects because they ostensibly pump money into an economy.

I’ve made the point that such outlays should be judged using cost-benefit analysis. Well, it appears that Spain listened to the wrong people. It got a €10,000 return on an infrastructure “investment” of €1,100,000,000.

One of Spain’s “ghost airports”—expensive projects that were virtually unused—received just one bid in a bankruptcy auction after costing about €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion) to build. The buyer’s offer: €10,000. Ciudad Real’s Central airport, about 235 kilometers south of Madrid, became a symbol of the country’s wasteful spending.

Wow, and I thought Social Security was a bad deal.

But Spanish politicians should be known for more than just misguided boondoggles.

Some of them also are working hard to make sure citizens don’t work too hard. Here’s a story from an English-language news outlet in Spain (h/t: Commentator).

Between the hours of 2pm and 5pm you will struggle to find anyone in the Valencian town of Ador; the town’s inhabitants will have taken to their beds to catch their mandatory forty winks. The town’s summer siesta tradition is so deep-rooted the mayor has enshrined his citizen’s right to an afternoon snooze in law. …Ador could be the first town in Spain to actually make taking a siesta obligatory by law. …The new rules also stipulate that children should remain indoors:

One imagines the next step will be mandatory bed checks by new bureaucrats hired for just that purpose.

Though maybe they would need special permission to take their mandatory siestas from 11:00-2:00 so they would be free to harass the rest of the population between 2:00-5:00.

In any event, we can add mandatory siestas to our list of bizarre government-granted human rights.

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