The French budget was based on a growth forecast of 1.4%. The revision, announced by the French Minister of Finance, Bruno le Maire, to 1% makes the French public debt, which is close to 3100 billion euros, even more unsustainable... The situation is more than alarming... The government does not talk about this debt, nor about the budget deficit; Bercy also does not talk about the fact that the "whatever it takes" approach is an endless race that brings France closer to the moment when the wall of its debt will explode.
The homeland of the Enlightenment has had fifty years of deficits since the last surplus budget dates back to 1974, the bygone era when Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was President of the French Republic.
This situation is unprecedented since the Ancien Régime, in the time of the Bourbon monarchy. It has no equivalent among the major developed countries. Today, as the economist Nicolas Baverez writes in Le Figaro, "France's public debt is unsustainable." Our deficit is structural at 4.5% of GDP, taxes peak at 48% of GDP compared to 42% on average in the Eurozone.... The conclusion is therefore unequivocal: France is almost the most indebted country in Europe, and its tax rate is also the highest... This means that the French public accounts are caught in a dangerous financial spiral: the public debt burden will reach 84 billion euros in 2027 (compared to 40 in 2021).... That is to say, the first budget, the first item of state expenditure... It is a financial bomb that risks exploding to the detriment of the stability of the entire Eurozone.
This French debt is not used to finance investments that would be the guarantee of additional wealth growth. On the contrary, borrowing serves to finance the operating expenses of a state incapable of reforming itself. And yet, on a daily basis, the French observe the deterioration of their public services. One only has to look at the state of education, the health sector... Beware, the awakening could be brutal and painful... Other countries have had bitter experiences in the past: the repeated crises of Argentina, which is in the hands of the markets and the IMF, or Greece in 2008 defaulting on its national debt are there precisely to remind us that economic collapse does not happen only to others. A few decades ago, Argentina had a level of wealth comparable to that of England. Today, this Latin American country is the only country in the world to have moved from the status of a developed economy to that of a developing economy.