In
the state of economic emergency, proclaimed last night by our
fearless leader, we look for comedy where we can find it. I found it in this declaration
signed by, among others, Bernard Henri-Levy and Miss France (of the two, of
course, it it Miss France who has all the brains) that the gilets jaunes should
immediately stop what they are doing, which has been successful, and begin
debating, which would be utterly unsuccessful but would give Bernard Henri-Levy
(and Miss France) a chance to appear on TV with a few random Gilets Jaunes and
pontificate.
Miss France might gain an audience with the Gilets Jaunes,
but not, I’m betting, the well coiffed, faux philosophe.
More seriously: we watched Macron’s speech last
night. Macron started off with a song of love, and he ended like a Chanel
commercial. The song of love was directed to the cops. As we know, from the
affair Benalla, which involved Macron’s body guard donning police gear and
beating the shit out of some passive protesters this spring, there is one
exception to Macron’s general contempt for public sector employees: the cop. Macron’s
handlers made a mistake in not cuing his words to music: surely this heartfelt
paen to order and its masculine forces should have been backgrounded by Gang of
Four’s “I love a man in a uniform”.
The rest of the speech was a curious performance.
The raising of the minimum wage by something like 75 centime per hour “without
costing the employer anything” seemed like a magic act. In American terms, it
is like raising the minimum wage by subtracting the amount from the Earned
Income Credit. It was as if Mr. Burns on the Simpsons told his workers that
they all get Christmas presents, and then deducted it from their paychecks. But
it sounded good – it must have been rehearsed to have the feel good vibe, which
is why it was announced as one hundred euros per month rather than 75 centimes
per hour.
On the main point, though, Macron held firm. His
supply side tax cut to the wealthy still stands. His reasoning still stands
too: cutting that tax is supposedly going to bring investment money into
France. It is what the late George H.W. Bush, in 1980, called voodoo economics.
At least under Reagan the tax cut was made with a fine indifference to the
deficit, since investment is not going to happen in an atmosphere of declining demand.
The Reaganite solution was, in fact, to inflate two deficits: by easing
regulations on credit, the medium household can take on a larger amount of debt
in order to sustain a consumer lifestyles that feeds into an economic boom. The
second step here, of course, involves mock horror about the government’s debt,
which then leads to cuts in the social welfare system, which then leads to
either further indebtedness by the household or bankruptcy. In France, the
loosening of consumer credit on the American model has not happened, at least
on the Reaganite scale. What has happened, especially as Macron is all about being
a deficit hawk, is that his policies have essentially been deflating consumer
demand. The carbon tax, with its exemptions for big carbon producers – the corporations
– was a final straw. In France, one can actually see what taxes are paying for,
in terms of healthcare, infrastructure, education and retirement: and what the
people see is a decline in the degree and quality of all of these things. You
can’t sustain Popular Front programs on a Thatcherite fiscal policy.
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