Whataboutism Is Rotting Our Brains, Our Consciences, and Our Politics
June 2, 2025
Don’t Buy the Nostalgia Trump Is Selling
June 2, 2025
Right from his inauguration, Donald Trump unleashed slash-and-burn austerity on the federal government — with even deeper cuts planned for coming months. As part of a breakneck eighteen-month agenda to maximize “governmental efficiency and productivity,” Trump has advanced a wide-ranging attack on the way the US government has hitherto functioned, including internationally.
In early April, Trump carried through on another campaign promise to upend global commerce by imposing massive tariffs on nearly every other country. Stock markets plunged, and business confidence evaporated. For a moment, it seemed like the postwar system of global commerce hung in the balance.
Trump’s smash-and-grab announcements sent governments around the world scrambling, faced with rising fears of Washington provoking a global recession.
In response to the initial “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, French premier François Bayrou told Le Parisien that Trump’s moves could trigger a global catastrophe. He warned that large numbers of jobs would be threatened, all of society would suffer, and that the human costs would be “considerable.”
But Bayrou also made sure that the crisis didn’t go to waste. He had already been facing a fierce upcoming budget battle in a bitterly divided National Assembly and quickly used the confrontation to get ahead of the debate. Bayrou warned that looming instability would also mean reduced investment in French industry. “Trump’s policy could cost us 0.5 percent of GDP,” he told the newspaper. France’s government has already revised down its GDP growth expectations for 2026, from 1.4 percent in October to 1.2 percent now.
At the height of the tariff fears, Trump pulled back, announcing a flat 10 percent tariff on every country except China for ninety days. The new battle plan was a trade war against Beijing — cranking up tariffs from 34 to 145 percent after China retaliated with its own new tariffs on the United States. The stock market rallied on the news that the massive global rates were out.
Since then, Trump has seesawed between threatening then rescinding promises to slap levies on countries all over the world. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced at a JPMorgan-hosted investment conference that trade negotiations between the United States and China wouldn’t drag on, reported the Financial Times. Bessent called the trade war between the two countries “unsustainable.”
Still, beyond the crackpot logic of perfectly balanced trade deficits, or plausible theories of market manipulation and insider trading, Trump’s trade war also suits other goals for ruling elites around the world. Even as they issue fiery rebukes and sensible-sounding condemnations, they are using this moment to push their existing agendas. For his part, Bayrou argues that the threat of a trade war makes addressing France’s budget deficit, which has ballooned during Emmanuel Macron’s eight years as president, even more urgent.
“If we don’t do anything, our debt burden will become far and away our biggest expense,” Bayrou warned. The French government’s goal, Bayrou says, is to get the budget deficit down from 5.4 percent to 3 percent by 2029.
“But this crisis could change everything,” he added, saying that France needs to make progress on how much it produces, how many hours it works, and how many jobs it creates.
At a press conference in mid-April, Bayrou laid out his government’s plan to cut €40 billion from the next budget to wrestle the deficit down. To accomplish this, he hasn’t ruled out lifting the limit on France’s thirty-five-hour workweek or even raising the retirement age. “Our duty is to look reality in the face,” he told Le Parisien.
With Trump’s trade war threats against Europe uncertain, Bayrou is still charging full speed ahead.
To meet its deficit target, also in line with nominal European limits, the French government’s goal is to slash 6 percent of public spending — worth €110 billion annually — between 2026 and 2029. And while Bayrou called France’s debt burden “a dangerous trap” that “threatens the country’s independence,” he’s also ruled out raising taxes to address the deficit, calling that solution “unsustainable.”
Instead, the government is looking for savings in all the familiar places — like France’s health care system. Bayrou is even putting paid sick days in the crosshair.
“It’s important to take into account that we spend more on sick days than on pensions,” Bayrou’s minister of social affairs, Catherine Vautrin, said recently, pointing to the €22 billion deficit forecast for social security spending in 2026.
Bayrou’s minister of public accounts, Amélie de Montchalin, pointed to the fact that France spent €17 billion covering sick days in 2024, a quarter more than it had in 2021.
According to de Montchalin, covering sick days so readily has created a situation where people think they’re entitled to “free access” to coverage — encouraging a lack of “personal responsibility.”
Last month, the government also flirted with new taxes on pensioners. Marc Ferracci, Bayrou’s minister of industry and energy, boosted a plan backed by Patrick Martin, the president of France’s equivalent to the Chamber of Commerce. Getting rid of a 10 percent tax deduction that pensioners can currently claim on up to €4,321 a month could generate €4-5 billion a year, Ferracci explained. Jean-Hervé Lorenzi, a liberal economist who’s a member of the board of the Edmond de Rothschild banking group in France, had a narrower proposal. For him, getting rid of the deduction for “wealthy” pensioners — defined in sweeping terms as those who get a net monthly payment of €3,000 or own their own homes — could raise €2.5 billion a year.
For now, those plans are on the back burner. Laurent Wauquiez, the head of the conservative Les Républicains, boasted in mid-May that he’d made de Montchalin back down by threatening to pull his party’s support from the government if they raised any taxes at all. His plans for cutting costs come from another direction: he wants to cut two-thirds of all the government’s agencies. He is now labeling himself a “French Milei,” akin to Argentina’s budget-slashing president, Javier Milei.
France has enjoyed robust public services and welfare measures ever since the social compromise negotiated between French labor and the ruling class after World War II. France has a rich — albeit romanticized — tradition of social conflict, and it would be difficult for any government to attack the social state, such as Trump has tried to do in the United States, without provoking an open confrontation with French labor. Macron, who has been president since 2017, is well-aware of this. He has pursued a clever strategy which takes account of this reality — but which has also produced the current fiscal crisis.
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Macron made sure that the state covered the salaries businesses paid to workers in order to avoid mass layoffs. But he’s also raised the retirement age and implemented more restrictive workfare programs. As economy minister from 2014 to 2016, and an important advisor to then president François Hollande, even before taking over the presidency Macron was a lead actor in a series of initiatives liberalizing France’s employment laws.
Despite this, France’s social state still does exist. But Macron’s slow-burn plan to dismantle it is starting to pay off.
Instead of dramatic, sudden cuts to spending, Macron has cut taxes. Significantly, he’s stripped local authorities of taxation powers, which used to include a tax on building housing and a tax on businesses. At the level of local départements, annual tax receipts are down €8 billion since 2022.
Falling tax revenues and increased spending obligations for benefits pegged to inflation has an inevitable outcome: at every level of government, funding is running out.
A recent 1.7 percent inflation-pegged boost for the RSA — a welfare payment for the poorest — was a bridge too far for département-level governments, which finance this benefit. On April 16, the conservative president of the body representing these local authorities announced that “the constant increase of social spending” is imperiling local governments’ capacity to “fulfill their essential missions.”
As a result, the commission said, local governments are being forced to make choices between investing in roads or social housing, cultural support or tourism and sports, which is damaging to regional planning efforts.
There are three main places tax money goes in France: funding social security, the state budget, and the local authorities. Thanks to tax cuts in recent years, a key source of funding for social security has been revenue from sales tax, known as value-added tax (VAT), which every French person pays. Sales tax revenue has also been plugging some funding gaps for local governments as their receipts have fallen.
Further budget pressures from both sides, including the elimination of a tax on fortunes and increasing debt obligations, has made sales tax revenue crucial to funding the state’s budget. But local, département-level, and regional budgets need the money now, too. Five years ago, 90 percent of sales tax revenue went to the state. Now just half of it does.
A shock like Trump’s trade war is the perfect opportunity for everything to come to a head, with the new, added threat of declining growth. Crushed between increased spending and falling revenue, and with no political consensus for raising taxes, the obvious result is the same option that Bayrou’s government is going for: spending cuts.
At the same time, Trump’s overblown threat to withdraw Washington from its trans-Atlantic role is a perfect opportunity for France to take on a leading role in a new European military order. At the same time as Bayrou talks about referendums to reign in government spending, he’s also promising €3 billion in additional military spending in the next budget. And as Bayrou’s ministers check temperatures in their search for fake sick days, France’s defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu, quietly unfroze €1.3 billion worth of defense spending credits, ostensibly earmarked for a rainy day.
Even with the bevy of cuts coming down the pipeline, the government’s independent High Council of Public Finances has warned that the deficit reduction trajectory they’ve laid out isn’t credible.
Last year, the government anticipated a 4.4 percent deficit. The actual number ended up being 5.8 percent. The new goal for 2025 is 5.4 percent, and then 4.6 percent in 2026, 4.1 percent in 2027, and 3.4 percent in 2028.
But even keeping the deficit down to 5.4 percent of GDP this year is far off, the council said on April 16. Getting there would “require strict control of discretionary and social spending.” Given the current fiscal situation, they warned that any margin for error in the case of a “new shock” appears to be “very limited.”
But maybe Washington’s behavior is nothing to fear. Back in March, Jordan Bardella, the president of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National party and a potential 2027 presidential candidate, called for creating a French ministry inspired by Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency.
France has lived “beyond its means” for the past fifty years, Bardella said. “It’s time for a big clean up.” For some at least, the Trump administration is an example for France, and not just a threat.
Great Job Marlon Ettinger & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
