High taxes in France, so what?

New York Times:
By Paul Krugman

Over the weekend The Times ran an article by a couple who moved from the United States to Finland, and were pleasantly surprised by how good life can be in a high-tax, high-services country. Quite a few readers seemed surprised — probably because, without even knowing it, they’ve been influenced by pervasive conservative propaganda.

The thing is, there was a time when negative views of Europe had some basis in reality. In the 1990s Europe’s major economies seemed to be suffering from “Eurosclerosis” — persistently weak job creation, and a seeming inability to keep up with the United States as we experienced a productivity boom based on information technology.

But time has passed, and Europe’s economies have moved on. The critics, however, haven’t. They’re still carping like it’s 1999.

Let’s talk, in particular, about the right’s favorite horror story, the socialist hellhole known as France. In some ways France isn’t the best example of a big-government society: The French have made some big mistakes, especially in retirement policy, that the Nordic economies haven’t. And the French themselves are, if you ask me, too willing to believe foreign critiques of their choices.

But let’s talk anyway about how French performance compares with ours.

First of all, mass unemployment is no longer a problem. Many of the French retire too young — as I said, they kind of screwed that up. But in their prime working years, the French are actually a bit more likely than Americans to have jobs.

France’s technology lag is also a thing of the past. The French are considerably more likely than their U.S. counterparts to have broadband access, largely because broadband costs less than half as much as it does here, mainly because the French government has acted to limit monopoly power while the U.S. government hasn’t.

France has universal health care, with excellent quality. And French life expectancy, which was similar to ours in the 1980s, has risen much faster since then, so that there’s now a 4-year gap.

What is true is that French G.D.P. per capita is substantially lower than ours, partly because of early retirement, more importantly because the French take much longer vacations. But is that necessarily a bad thing?

Now, all of this costs money. French taxes are 46 percent of G.D.P., compared with only 24 percent here. But French taxpayers clearly get a lot in return.

And that, of course, is why U.S. conservatives insist that France must, despite all appearances, be a socialist hellhole. Their whole worldview is rooted in the assertion that taxes are a terrible, destructive thing, so a country that levies taxes as high as France’s must be a disaster area, no matter how nice it looks.

I mean, what are you going to believe, our doctrine or your own lying eyes?