The French balance sheet has three big expenses, plus a big decline in tax revenues from their track record of deindustrialization (Renault just can't compete with BYD essentially, but for most types of industry except Aerospace and Fashion, the two of which aren't very big).
These three expenses are pensions, consumer energy subsidies and the 1986 drop in marginal tax rates that has remained to this day. Fixing the balance sheet at this point will need either the starvation diet of cutting these three things or some kind of regimented and austere national training program on compulsory purchased land (paid in deferred interest bonds like Singapore did) to build any kind of economy that has a hope of competing with Chinese products. Or possibly, a mix of both.
However, it's an open question of whether the French state has the ability to force hundreds of thousands of youths into STEM barracks if it desired to. The barracks don't exist in enough numbers and the francophone STEM experts to be recruited to do the army-style STEM training in this hypothetical might also not exist in enough numbers for it to ever work.
Not mentioned by me so far is the additional option of cutting energy costs directly by building green production under a nationalised program, or intervening in the Russo-Ukrainian war, or intervening in the US-Iran war, or seizing African fossil fuels production by force. The first one might work, I don't know about the bottlenecks, but the French conventional military is not in a position to make the other three work.
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If they don't do anything at all they will just get poorer and more prone to mass violence. Prosperity comes from producing goods and services at some combination of price and quality points that the competition doesn't beat you at and the competition in the world today is very fierce.
These three expenses are pensions, consumer energy subsidies and the 1986 drop in marginal tax rates that has remained to this day. Fixing the balance sheet at this point will need either the starvation diet of cutting these three things or some kind of regimented and austere national training program on compulsory purchased land (paid in deferred interest bonds like Singapore did) to build any kind of economy that has a hope of competing with Chinese products. Or possibly, a mix of both.
However, it's an open question of whether the French state has the ability to force hundreds of thousands of youths into STEM barracks if it desired to. The barracks don't exist in enough numbers and the francophone STEM experts to be recruited to do the army-style STEM training in this hypothetical might also not exist in enough numbers for it to ever work.
Not mentioned by me so far is the additional option of cutting energy costs directly by building green production under a nationalised program, or intervening in the Russo-Ukrainian war, or intervening in the US-Iran war, or seizing African fossil fuels production by force. The first one might work, I don't know about the bottlenecks, but the French conventional military is not in a position to make the other three work.
.
If they don't do anything at all they will just get poorer and more prone to mass violence. Prosperity comes from producing goods and services at some combination of price and quality points that the competition doesn't beat you at and the competition in the world today is very fierce.