How Are Things in France?

If you think that you have it bad, check out what is happening in France. A combination of government ineptitude and bad immigration policy is destroying the nation. The president, Emmanuel Macron, seems incapable of doing anything to stop it. 

Let’s begin with the state of the French healthcare system. You know all about it. It’s free. People pay for it with their taxes. The Democratic Party wants to import it into America.

Guy Milliere reports for the Gatestone Institute:

Although France spends a significant amount on its healthcare (8.6% of France's GDP), the pandemic there has been frighteningly mismanaged. There was a tragic shortage of intensive-care beds: 5,000 for the whole country, compared to Germany's 28,000. There was also, until the end of April, a near-total lack of masks and protective equipment for hospital doctors and caregivers. Further, there was the great lack of an ability to test for the coronavirus. The situation led the government to decide on one of the strictest general lockdowns in Europe. For eight weeks, the French economy, like others, effectively stopped. The results were devastating.

Apparently, nationalized health care did not work so well. But, how is the economy doing? Also, not so well. High unemployment, intrusive regulations and an overly powerful bureaucracy produced economic stagnation:

France, before the pandemic, was already in an alarming economic state. For several years, the country's growth rate had been barely above zero; the country's central bank had lowered its growth forecast for 2020 to 1.1%. France's unemployment rate was high (8.1%); it had not fallen below 8% for two decades. France was, in addition, paralyzed from any kind of growth by a proliferation of regulations and an omnipresent bureaucracy. The Index of Economic Freedom, published each year by the Heritage Foundation, ranks France number 64 , behind the United Kingdom (7), the Netherlands (14), Germany (27), and far behind formerly communist countries such as Poland (46), Romania (42), Bulgaria (37) or the Czech Republic (23).

Today, France is in recession, a bad recession:

France has now entered a deep recession. Economists anticipate that growth at the end of 2020 will be minus 8%. By comparison, the figure given for Germany is minus 6.3%. Many economists seem unsure if, in 2021, growth in France will resume at all. They say the country's rigidities are such that for the country fully to recover, it could take a decade. Although the French government has not published any recent statistics on unemployment, commentators say that one out of two persons working in the private sector is now unemployed. Worse, as a large number of small and medium businesses have gone bankrupt during the pandemic, there is virtually no hope of seeing millions of jobs quickly recreated. Although the French government also has not published any recent statistics on poverty, an increase in unemployment is bound to go hand-in-hand with an increase in poverty.

And let’s not forget taxation. France is a high tax country. Surely, this inhibits economic growth:

Before the pandemic, taxes and public spending, the highest in the developed world, also further paralyzed France's economy. The overall tax burden equaled 48.4% of the country's GDP; government spending amounted to 56.5% of the country's GDP. The country's budget deficit was at least 3% a year. To cover its spending, the government, had to borrow; so the country's debt continued to rise. In 2019, it reached 100% of GDP.

As though that were not bad enough, France has admitted a plethora of Muslim migrants. These latter are acting like conquerors: they have established a separate state within France. They have no intention to assimilate:

France's situation is all the more untenable in that for decades it has been a country of high immigration. France has accepted hundreds of thousands of newcomers -- on average, 400,000 migrants annually. Most have no marketable skills and rely on welfare indefinitely. Among people living on social benefits, the proportion of first-generation immigrants is more than 20% -- double the rest of the population. Even if the French government decided to put an abrupt end to immigration, the weight of unskilled immigrants already present in the country would not disappear.

As for assimilation, consider this:

Before the pandemic, integrating Muslims into the general population did not seem to be working particularly well. In a survey conducted for the Institute Montaigne in 2016, 29% of French Muslims questioned said that, "Islamic law (sharia) is more important than the law of the Republic"; 65% said that women should wear an Islamic veil and that women who do not wear one are "immodest", and 24% said that modest women should wear the niqab, a veil that also covers the face. The figures for responders under the age of 25 were even higher.

And, also:

Muslim populations are increasingly living apart from the rest of the population. In Muslim neighborhoods, for instance, the lockdown was not respected at all. When journalists asked Muslims why they did not pay attention to the pandemic, they replied that Allah was protecting them and that the sickness only affected infidels.

There you have a perfect breeding ground for the virus. But, Allah will protect them, so they do not need to social distance or to see physicians.

France has over 700 No-Go zones:

There are presently 751 sensitive zones in France. There, gangs reign and the law that is enforced is the law of Islam, sharia. Most of the non-Muslim residents have gone. Doctors enter these areas only under escort. During the last decade, several perpetrators of the jihadist attacks that struck France -- and left 263 dead and many more wounded -- came from these districts. More than 150 mosques there are run by radical imams who incite hatred without the slightest murmur.

And you think that America has problems.