Only for the past 70 years. Before that europeans were the bomb-lobbing record holders.

Healthcare is about 17% in the US GDP and 30% of the federal budget. The US spends more on public healthcare as a % of GDP than almost all European countries, including France which spends about 12% of GDP on healthcare.

It's hard to get a comparable read since you don't get a clean split in the #s between what would be public spending vs. private spending if the US + a "Medicare for All" type system, but including the % of GDP spent in US on healthcare overall, it would put government expenditures as % of GDP on par with most other countries in the world that do provide universal health care:

* https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/... * https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

France certainly has a higher % of expenditure to GDP than other comparable countries, and you would expect the USA health care to GDP % to decline to be more inline with other countries with universal coverage if a national program was introduced.

However, because France is still offering more public social services and benefits overall vs. a "USA + universal health" that it's hard to make broad claims either way about who is wasting more money or which system is more effective for citizens based purely on % of government expenditure to total GDP.

All great things for sure. But the French economy has been stagnant for decades. There is no growth. One option would be to allow more immigration, but not allow the immigrants to have access to the public benefits. Obviously that is a divisive political issue they struggle badly with.

The issue is a lot of French people in the private sector (small businesses, contractors etc.) actually work really hard and often long hours to subsidise public sector employees barely working and retiring at 55.

At the end of the day, that just isn't sustainable politically and it's pretty questionable if it's morally correct either

6 week vacation?

Europe has been on a 30 year vacation, and it's starting to look like that vacation might need to end.

At some point the money runs out for all of that stuff, it seems that in France that's just about to happen.

That's true, but you have to actually be investing in growth for it to come up. Instead the next generation will get both spiriling interest payments and crumbling infrastructure.

I took it to mean more that europe relies on France for nuclear deterrence against outside threats so treats them with gentle gloves more than Europe is afraid of France nuking them. Right now more than ever they really need someone with nukes on their side.

> Haha, what? How is France having nuclear weapons leverage over other countries in the Eurozone? What kind of thing do you think the Eurozone or EU even is? We don't use threats of violence against each other in negotiations. France having nuclear weapons or not matters zilch in these conversations, because we're all allies.

Greece says hello!

Well they're right: The IMF routinely takes over countries that have too much debt, but it hasn't done this to France.

> How is France having nuclear weapons leverage over other countries in the Eurozone?

If there's one thing a bank is scared of, it's getting nuked. /s

I think the issue here is that France can't print more euros to cover it, other countries have to cover it since they share currency they are all responsible for the debt