Over the last two weeks, protests and riots alike have rocked France as the country’s public spending has failed to deliver what voters were promised, for the simple reason that central planning and excessive spending do not work. 

But even more striking is the scale of that spending. According to the RAND Corporation, France’s total public spending stands at 57 percent of GDP. That is higher than the Soviet Union’s 50 percent at the time of its collapse, Venezuela’s 38 percent under Hugo Chávez, or Communist China’s 33 percent. For reference, even the United States, where public spending is, in many respects, already excessive, stands at between about 24 percent of GDP federally, but combined with state spending that number jumps to between 34 and 38 percent. 

Of course, spending is just one measure. But the problem is compounded by the underlying sense of entitlement that France’s excessive public spending has created. Society believes itself entitled to other people’s wages and business profits, yet feels little responsibility to sustain the process of wealth creation before jumping straight to redistribution. That leaves the government under constant pressure to maintain its promises, even as its ability to finance them erodes. 

According to a Wall Street Journal analysis using OECD figures, several factors have contributed to France’s social unrest. The first is that households are only now beginning to feel the costs that government subsidies had temporarily held back. Between 2022 and 2024, the government rolled out extensive energy subsidies financed through deficit spending, to keep inflation below that of neighboring countries, the ultimate example of sacrificing the future to cushion the present. But that protection of course didn't last as inflation rose from a mere 0.93 percent in 2025 to 2.41 percent in 2026. 

Meanwhile, France is expected to be one of the few major economies, alongside the United States, to run a larger budget deficit this year. That puts the government between a rock and a hard place: it faces pressure to spend more to maintain entitlements and cushion rising costs, but its previous spending has left it with less room to do either. 

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And those pressures come against a backdrop of stagnating wages. Average annual wages fell from just over $61,000 in 2019 to just over $60,000 in 2025, while the country’s tax burden remained above 43 percent of GDP, barely changing from the year 2000. 

That brings France back to the underlying problem: a public accustomed to redistribution and public spending to cushion economic pressures, a government increasingly constrained in its ability to provide either, and too little attention paid to the wealth creation needed to sustain it all.

And just to illustrate how extreme France’s tax laws are in funding all that public spending, below is a breakdown of what a French employee earning €100,000 a year ($111,437.50), reportedly enough to place them among the country’s top 2 percent of earners, actually takes home and how much goes to taxes.

For all this spending, the promises have fallen short of what voters expected. Many have been quick to blame mass migration, but to the extent that it has exacerbated France’s problems, it has compounded a deeper issue: a public that has come to see redistribution as an entitlement, regardless of what the government can afford. Blaming who receives the money leaves that mentality untouched. It merely replaces “the government owes everyone” with “the government owes us.”

Whether France will recognize the error of its ways remains unclear. But Americans should be more concerned with their own country, which, although moving more slowly, is heading in the same direction. We resist reforming Social Security because we believe we are entitled to it. We resist reforming Medicare because we were promised it. And we resist reforming welfare because so many people rely on it. In each case, dependence on a program becomes the argument against changing it. 

In other words, we are cultivating the same government dependency now rocking France. Until we recognize that its crisis is rooted not simply in who receives public money, but in the entitlement and dependence that spending creates, the United States will remain on the same path, mistaking France’s predicament for a foreign problem rather than a warning about our own future.