[Moody’s] said France’s long-term economic growth had been hit by its inflexible labour market and low levels of innovation eroding its competitiveness and industrial base.
Moody’s also flagged up the country’s exposure to the continuing eurozone crisis.
It warned the “predictability” of France’s resilence of further shocks in the eurozone was diminishing while the country’s exposure to the highly indebted countries such as Spain and Greece was disproportionately high.
I can’t help but think that this story will be written about the US very soon. The recent election sealed our fate economically. The socialist policies being enacted will not help. The current situation that the makers of Twinkies and WonderBread have found themselves in should be a sign but apparently people don’t see it. The company can’t continue with the high cost of the union workers pay, benefit, and retirement demands. No company can but Obama seems to want unionism forced on us all. Of course the unions dumpred tons of money to help reelect him and they want to be paid back. The democrats talk about taking care of the middle class and enact polices that doom the middle class. Manufactureing jobs in America have become very scarce. How many companies have moved manufacturing operations outside of the US? Why? They can not pay the wages and benefits that the unions have demanded and survive. So, the American middle class jobs go overseas. The unions did a lot of good when they were first formed. They brought about a lot of positive change. That was 100 years ago. Now they make rich men out of their leaders, create artificially high wage and benefit demands and drive jobs over seas and companies out of business. As I said, look at Twinkies. When General Motors has to pay $72.00 per hour in wages, benefits and retirement per assembly line worker, no wonder the company failed. Workers do not seem to understand how much they cost. All most people look at is how much they take home. The trust fund taxes (social security and medicare) eat up a lot of money. When you add insurance onto that as well as other benefits, a persons salary is a small part of the pie. Unions don’t care if they wreck the American economy as long as they get rich, but it has to end somewhere. Our national debt along with an administration that is pro union, anti capitalism, anti competetive energy will take us to where France is now and worse. Of course the singles that voted for Obama don’t look at the big picture, they just look at what they take home and what the government has done for them. When the house of cards fails, which it will just like the housing bubble, what then? We have nothing to fall back on. We throw billions at education and have a failing education system. We throw billions at the so called “war on poverty” and we have more people inpoverty than ever. Don’t blame Bush, he didn’t create the elephant in the room, the unions. I know some people that retired from the City of New York that make more in retirement than people working in the same jobs where I live. They worked a lot of overtime over the last two to three years of their working career to artificially inflate their earnings to inflate their retirement. Their union contract created that situation. Yes , they as individuals are better off but can this be sustained by the city? How? Artificially high union wage and benefit demands have driven manufacturing overseas so that we have become a service economy. Innovation and invention is down in the US as well as education, so how can we continue and not decline to what Italy, Spain, and Greece are facing today? I hope we can but I just don’t see it happening, not with socialists running the country.