America is 'going broke slowly' says J.P. Morgan, as national debt balloons and tariff revenue looks shaky

[DFW]

57. All their citizens are happy? Your France can't be the one in Europe.

I’m in France at least three times a month for my job, and I speak the language. The French, while they are mostly content with their health care system, despise their tax system. They hate their wealth tax, which kicks in at under a million euros, their gold tax, which is 11.5% of anything you sell, and any number of tiny taxes that chip away at the purchasing power of the middle class. They especially dislike the sky-high 50% payroll tax (varies slightly with the salary level), which puts a serious damper on full-time jobs in the private sector. This excepts government bureaucrats, of which there are far too many. That last, by the way, goes for many EU countries, including Germany, where I live.

Though the French are the original Chauvins, there are no greater critics of the French government than the French, themselves, and their multiple-times-year strikes back that up. When the working man in France, of which we have a couple, so this comes from them, not some blog, nets a third of what his employer shells out to employ him, both employer AND employee are angry about it. No French government dares to offer major reform, either, because it never finds enough support in the parliament to pass. Goscinny and Uderzo, when they made up their fiercely resistant Gallic village that would not submit to Cæsar’s will, pretty much composed a perfect microcosm of France, itself.