IN’s Cooper: Those crazy French, er, Americans

It’s so much fun to pick on the French.
Their Gallic haughtiness, which manifests itself in contempt for everything and everyone who isn’t French — except for Jerry Lewis and tortured artistes with greasy hair — is legendary.
So the French fracas over raising the national retirement age from 60 to 62 makes an easy target. How can the lazy French, who already get something like 47 weeks of vacation a year and are forever taking six-hour lunches with their mistresses, complain about working two extra years?
The Socialists, as you might expect, are charge that ordinary workers are being forced to bear the brunt of financial crisis. President Nicolas Sarkozy of the center-right Union for a People’s Movement party points to the gaping $41 billion shortfall in this year’s payroll tax revenues and says that France simply cannot afford to continue its current retirement policy.
Just like “Les Miserables,” there’ll be strikes and passionate picketing and mobs of angry French workers. In the end, there’ll be some kind of compromise (61½ anyone?) and all those Sauvignon-besotted Frenchmen still will be retiring years ahead of us hard-working Americans.
But before we start strutting around with our red, white and blue sense of superiority, let’s step back and look realistically at our own sense of entitlement.
If you substitute dollars for euros, Americans are just as ridiculous as the French. While we’re worried about the ballooning federal deficit, we still want low taxes, cheap mortgages and ever-increasing government pensions (Social Security).
Yes, the political right in America has been warning about our profligate spending for some time. But once in power, Republicans, who traditionally have been the party of fiscal responsibility, turn out to be as liberal on the spending front as Democrats — yet they are reluctant to pay for their largesse through higher taxes.
The left, of course, defines wealth as any earned income above the minimum wage and doesn’t mind taxes intended to soak the rich. But Democrats ignore the fact that income of $75,000 in practically every state other than Wyoming or Mississippi puts families solidly in the getting-by class, not the Nancy Pelosi class. And they refuse to accept that small businesses, where many owners make six-figure incomes, are the engine of job and wealth creation.
Since it’s in the interests of Republicans to talk about tax-and-spend Democrats, and since it’s in the interests of Democrats to talk about tax-cuts-for-the-rich Republicans, it’s in no politician’s interest to talk about the reality of America’s fiscal plight.
The electoral successes of the Tea Party are a sign that many Americans are concerned about runaway government spending. The big test will come when we are handed the bill for our profligacy in the form of higher taxes AND cuts to favorite programs (Social Security, Medicare, lavish public sector pensions, corporate subsidies and bridges to nowhere).
If life imitates art, will we act like John Wayne — or Inspector Clouseau?

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