An 1840 Massachusetts Legislature Committee Prediction on a Government-Controlled Education System

In 1840, Horace Mann was pushing the state of Massachusetts to establish a government-run education system after the model of the state-run schools of Prussia and France.  A legislative committee upon evaluating this proposal made three predictions:

• It would destroy America's republican principles.
• It would be a tool to increase government power.
• It would spread propaganda and diminish the influence of parents on their children.

All of these predictions have come true.  The committee appears to have failed to anticipate how broadly incompetent a government-controlled education system would be, however.

Debt and Deficits in the Socialist Republic of France

France, under Nicholas Sarkozy, has a budget deficit of 8% of GDP this year.  This is second only to that of Greece in Europe, according to The Economist in the text of an article in the issue of 19 - 25 June 2010.  Unfortunately, a graph accompanying the article indicates that Spain has a deficit of just under 10% of GDP.  Uhmmm....they can't get everything right, after all, The Economist endorsed Obama in the election of 2008, is a stout defender of catastrophic man-made global warming, and loves cap and trade legislation!  It always pays to read things critically and carefully.

France's public debt is 84% of GDP.  Despite the recent surge in U.S. public debt, our public debt is currently 57% of GDP.  It is not expected to be long before our debt is as bad as that of France.  But the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is so worried about our debt that he is complaining about it, as is the Tea Party movement.  We are likely to make some substantial decreases in spending when the new Congress starts in January 2011.  The French do not seem to have the will to make substantial reductions in spending.  It starts with Sarkozy.

France is making some minor cuts.  It has raised the retirement age from 60 now to 62 in 2018.  The state pension fund shortfall in 2020 will be the equivalent of $55 billion.  It expects to save less than half that amount with the increase in the retirement age.  The top income tax rate is being raised from 40% to 41% in 2011.  In 2020, civil servants will have to contribute 10.5% of pay to their pension fund, rather than the present 8.1%.  France hopes growth will be vigorous and that will spur additional tax revenues.  Most observers believe the needed growth goal will not be reached.  Euro-rules require France to reduce its deficit all the way down to 3% of GDP by 2013. 

One of the factors making spending cuts hard and hurting growth is the fact that 20% of France's employees work for the government.  France is currently spending 56% of GDP, which is more than any other Euro-zone country.  Moody's has warned that France's rising debt may endanger its AAA credit rating.  Of course, Obama wants to duplicate these factors in the U.S.  How idiocentric is that?

IMF Projects Some Out-of-This-World National Debts

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has produced the debt predictions for the year 2014 given below.  The chart is from the 27 March - 2 April 2010 issue of The Economist.  The bar graph plot is actually of the increase in the national debt from 2007 to the projected debt of 2014, which is given in the small boxes on the right as a percent of the nations GDPs.

The United States IMF-projected increase in the national debt from 2007, when the Democrats were in their first year of controlling Congress, looks to be about 47% between then and 2014.  Both Japan and Great Britain will have added even more to their national debts, but note that the U.S. has recently been much more profligate in its overspending than even such stalwart socialist countries as France, Germany, and Italy.  While Japan's projected 2014 national debt will guarantee its sluggish growth for decades as it struggles under an unimaginable debt 246% greater than its GDP, the projected national debt of the U.S. at 108% of GDP will make us stagger a good deal also.  We will wind up with a national debt worse than that of Britain, France, and Germany, each of which we recognize as irresponsible socialist countries.  What does this make the U.S.?

Kudos belong to Canada, which has been much wiser in managing its economy throughout this recession.  It is increasing its national debt by only about 5% from 2007 to 2014 and its 2014 national debt will be a mere 69% of its GDP.  That should position Canada for solid growth in the near future and leave Canadians much less burdened with debt and the interest on that debt than the wayward Americans to the south.  It looks as though I would be wise to shift some of my retirement investment to Canada, where it may be safer and have better prospects for growth.

The French Carbon Tax Bill is Found Unconstitutional

The new French carbon tax was scheduled to go into law on 1 January 2010. The tax was 17 euros per ton of carbon dioxide (USD $24.40). In France, if at least 60 Deputies of the House and 60 Senators appeal to the Constitutional Council, it has the power to determine the constitutionality of a proposed law.  The 2010 national budget of France, which contained enabling provisions for a carbon tax has been ruled unconstitutional on two grounds:

• The exemptions contained within the provisions for a carbon levy vitiated the primary declared purpose of the levy, to combat carbon emissions and hence “global warming”
• The exemptions would cause the levy to fall disproportionately on gasoline and heating oils and not on other carbon emissions, thereby breaching the principle that taxation should be evenly and fairly borne.

This ruling has come as quite a shock to the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming alarmists.

The French, Socialism, and Suicide

In the past, I have written that depression and excessive drunkenness tend to be common in despotic and specifically communist and highly socialist societies.  I wrote about the increase in drinking and health problems in socialist Great Britain.  There I also referred to the heavy drinking in Russia.  I believe heavy drinking, depression, drug use, and suicide tend to increase when people feel little empowered to control their own lives.  Since socialism is the shift of self-control to government control, there is likely to be a tendency for depression, drinking, drug use, and suicide to increase as a nation becomes more socialist.  This tendency is particularly strong for men, who seem to have a greater need for self-control than do women.  This is evidenced in the higher percentage of men who are Republican compared to women in the United States.  The social conservatives are more evenly split between men and women, but the fiscal and defense Republicans are more predominantly men.

The French are coddled.  They are provided health care, long holidays, protected jobs, free college educations, and welfare galore.  There are problems, however:

• There are few permanent jobs for the young, since job-protection rules keep employers from hiring and young people are only brought onto projects as contract workers.
• Permanent workers cannot be let go, so they are often given meaningless work, sometimes in the hopes that they will leave the company.
• Competitive pressures are increasing , due to foreign competition and the privatization of some French government operations.
• Only 32% of French employers have confidence in their workers, while German employers have a 47% confidence level and Americans a 54% confidence level.

Perhaps this kind of society is just too eviscerating for men.  Perhaps they need a challenge and they even need the insecurities of life that make the personal achievement of security rewarding and makes life more interesting.  Boredom is more depressing than challenge any day.

According to an Editorial in the Economist of 10 - 16 October, the French suicide rate is 14.6 per 100,000 people, with men having a rate of 22.8 vs. a rate of 7.5 for women.  Only the suicide rates of Finland and Belgium exceed those of France in Western Europe.  In Eastern Europe, the Russians had a suicide rate of 32.2 per 100,000 people in 2005.  The suicide rates in Lithuania and Ukraine are also very high.  The French suicide rate is twice that of Great Britian and 40% higher than in Germany and the U.S.

Two out of five French people have a case of serious depression at some period in their lives.  The French use more anti-depressant pills than the British or the Germans, with public health insurance paying for anti-depressant drugs for one in ten of the French people.

This is the direction Obama is taking the United States in.  We can anticipate higher rates of depression and more suicides, especially among men.  We can also anticipate smaller cars and increased rates of highway deaths and injuries due to his demands for ever lighter cars to meet higher and higher gas mileage requirements.  He will also lead us to rationed health care and the added deaths that come with fewer future medical innovations and less aggressive treatments due to health care rationing.  We need to keep track of the death toll in each of these categories as we travel the deadly road to ever more intrusive socialism.