HN Reader

Wealth inequality is causing many protests recently. Indonesia's protest was about wealth inequality where nepo babies flaunt wealth on social media while the poor are suffering. Exact same situation in Nepal. Seems to be the same generally in France even if the trigger for protests is not the same. The main theme is that these protests are led by Gen Z people.

It's the younger generation that is hurting because they do not own real estate and stocks so they have not benefited from wealth creation via money printing and ZIRP era.

My guess is that this will happen in the US soon as well. Entry level jobs are threatened by low investments due to tariffs, high interest rates, and the perceived notion that AI is taking their jobs. Young couples can't afford to buy a home to start a family because interest rates are 3x higher than a few years ago while home prices went way up since covid - not to mention ever increasing real estate tax, home insurance, etc. Now the tariffs will make everything much more expensive for the working class. Tariffs go into paying down national debt while the rich get a tax break via BBB. Tariffs disproportionally affects the poor.

It's hard to be a 22 year old college grad right now. Not as bad as 2008 but definitely harder than in the last 15 years.

PS. Everyone living in the west missed it but the 2019 Hong Kong protests were more about wealth inequality even if the trigger was the China extradition law. This was never mentioned in western media. I was living there during the protest. Young Hong Kongers felt hopeless because real estate prices to income ratio was the highest in the world at the time. By far. They didn't want to live in an apartment the size of an American bedroom with a family of 4 and spend a lifetime trying to pay it off - if they could even muster up the downpayment for it. Unlike Americans who can move to a more affordable city or state, young Hong Kongers had no where else to go. This pent up frustration for young Hong Kongers boiled over into months long riots.

Note that both the deficit and debt levels that are seen as so problematic in France are lower than American levels.

If everyone protested like the French the world would be a much better place.

The French know how to do a proper protest. The US would do well to learn from them.

avoir le beurre et l'argent du beurre

I asked bing to balance France's debt and it did a good job and then just started giving me the "right answers" when I started asking about the rest of Europe - as if it got bored with going deep into the numbers which was weird. Point being that balancing the budget from an outsider perspective would seem relatively straightforward.

https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/bmrc7HWmP4TPMx5vfzTyz

Looks like numbers for France's deficit and debt are similar to the US.

I'd never advocate for the French level of rioting violence, but I hope we follow some of their footsteps here in Belgium. We're under the same pressure and have allowed an abomination of a neo-liberal government to take hold.

I have some acquaintances complaining they will now have to pay a modest tax of stock purchases and capital gains. My, oh my… sorry about that, let's keep destroying the lower and middle classes instead.

Belgium really could borrow a spine from its neighbour. We don't have one Macron, we have a small cabinet of 'em.

I do wonder what the French population actually want as a solution to the unsustainable debt and huge proportion of tax revenue(second highest in the EU) spent on social benefits.

Clearly they recognise a need for reform because they vote for politicians who run on a reform platform. Yet as soon as said reformer tries to change anything at all, it's back to the barricades.

Reduce benefits? Riot!

Increase tax rates? Riot!

Extend the retirement age? Riot!

Increase immigration? Riot!

France do protests and civil disobedience like no one else and I'm here for it.

All I know is this. People keep on saying the economic model of what the French people want isn't sustainable. Is the US model sustainable? From all accounts, nope. So what do we do? Go back to communism?

The funny part is, regardless of which social, cultural or economic model you want, the one that everyone hate is the inequality.