No. But it's lovely the journalist gets invited to dine with such elite company.
[NY Times] Is François Hollande more like Mariano Rajoy or Mario Monti? In other words, is the French socialist president condemned to be always behind the curve with reform, as the conservative Spanish prime minister is? Or can he get ahead of it, as the technocratic Italian premier has?
I put this question to my fellow guests at a dinner in Gay Paree last week. La Belle France is not at imminent risk of blowing up, as wrongly implied by the British magazine The Economist, with its latest dramatic front cover showing baguettes tied together like sticks of dynamite with a lighted fuse. It is a much richer country than Spain. And its people are more willing to pay their taxes than are the Italians. French 10-year borrowing costs are only 2.1 percent, compared with Italia's 4.9 percent and Spain's 5.9 percent.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
11/19/2012 00:00 ||
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#1
More willing to pay their taxes than the Italians...that's damning with faint praise.
#2
Actually France collects taxes against property which tends to retard falls in the affordability of land, without the deadweight effect of taxes on commerce.
France's main problems are not it's high business taxes*, but it's regulatory culture where so much needs a bureaucrats approval.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
