{"id":41229,"date":"2018-12-03T13:25:18","date_gmt":"2018-12-03T18:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41229"},"modified":"2018-12-03T13:25:18","modified_gmt":"2018-12-03T18:25:18","slug":"is-this-macrons-let-them-eat-cake-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41229","title":{"rendered":"Is This Macron’s “Let Them Eat Cake” Moment?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Is This Macron’s “Let Them Eat Cake” Moment?<\/a><\/span><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Never underestimate\u00a0French\u00a0protests and never underestimate tax protests.<\/strong><\/em> Still, that seems what\u00a0French\u00a0President\u00a0Emmanuel Macron has been doing…<\/p>\n

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Former US\u00a0President\u00a0Ronald Reagan once described what, according to him, was typically a government\u2019s view of the economy: \u201cIf it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.\u201d <\/em><\/strong>With diesel, the cycle started with subsidies. Between 1995 and 2015, the share of diesel cars on European roads doubled to around 50 per cent. Without government\u00a0support<\/a>\u00a0for diesel-fulled cars, which were\u00a0thought<\/a>\u00a0to emit less CO2 than their petrol counterparts, researchers have\u00a0concluded<\/a>\u00a0the share would have remained constant around 25 per cent.<\/p>\n

Now that we\u2019ve arrived in the taxation stage, which has pushed up prices by\u00a023 percent<\/a>\u00a0in France over the last year, Macron is feeling the heat. Some 77 per cent of\u00a0French\u00a0people now support the yellow vests movement, and the number\u00a0is<\/a>\u00a0rising<\/a>.<\/strong> Even among Macron\u2019s own voters, support stands at 41 percent. Some of the leaders of former\u00a0President\u00a0Hollande\u2019s party are also on the street, despite being the ones who came up with some of the taxes that are being contested. The centre-Right and hard-Left opposition have also united against Macron to express support.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0French\u00a0socialist party has\u00a0accused<\/a>\u00a0Macron\u2019s government of trying to link this grassroots movement to the far right Marine Le Pen \u201cto better disqualify it\u201d.<\/strong> But according to sociologist Vincent Tiberj, the yellow vests movement\u00a0derives<\/a>\u00a0largely from the lower-middle classes, who earn enough to pay taxes but not enough to live comfortably. A lot of the protesters\u00a0come<\/a>\u00a0from \u201cLa France profonde\u201d: small towns and rural areas that have often gone through dire economic times, far away from the world of Emmanuel Macron, a former\u00a0investment banker<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is This Macron’s “Let Them Eat Cake” Moment? Never underestimate\u00a0French\u00a0protests and never underestimate tax protests. Still, that seems what\u00a0French\u00a0President\u00a0Emmanuel Macron has been doing… Former US\u00a0President\u00a0Ronald Reagan once described what, according to him, was typically a government\u2019s view of the economy: \u201cIf it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15342,333,23322,23328,23327,657,783,23287],"class_list":["post-41229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-france","tag-fuel-taxes","tag-open-europe","tag-pieter-cleppe","tag-protests","tag-taxes","tag-yellow-vest-protests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41229"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41230,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41229\/revisions\/41230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}