r/france spent the day wrestling with two fault lines: who pays for the system, and whether the system still deserves trust. The crowd is unusually clear-eyed—calling out fiscal theater abroad, institutional shrinkage at home, and a tech state that still trips over its own cables.
Redistribution vs. Austerity: France Watches, Then Tightens
Nothing draws French eyes faster than an audacious tax experiment elsewhere, and Brazil obliged with a bold rebalancing—an overhaul that scraps income tax for the middle class while raising rates on top earners. In parallel, the domestic mood warmed to a bigger ambition: the Nobel economist-backed push for a 2% mega-wealth tax for fortunes above €100 million. The pattern is familiar: when global elites harvest 6% returns like clockwork, the subreddit wonders why French policy still treats inequality as a budgetary rounding error.
"I’m sure all high incomes in France would agree to have an income tax of only 10%..." - u/Minatoku92 (38 points)
Yet redistribution rhetoric meets austerity reality. While Greeks mount a general strike against 13-hour workdays, France toys with shrinking consumer protection by liquidating the INC and 60 Millions de Consommateurs. The net effect? A politics that gestures left with taxation headlines, then trims public-interest institutions and labor protections when the spreadsheets arrive.
Accountability Theater: Scandals, Files, and Narrative Control
French voters ask for clean hands; instead, they get databases and denials. The day’s most shared scrutiny came from an investigation that catalogs the “casseroles” of RN deputies—a civic attempt to make reputations searchable before they become untouchable. Meanwhile, prestige eroded elsewhere as the high-profile psychoanalyst Gérard Miller was detained over sexual assault allegations, feeding the familiar French cycle: elite claims to moral authority, followed by tabloid-grade exposure.
"Le Point and its fluctuating relationship to reality." - u/morinl (96 points)
Media credibility took a direct hit, too. When Mediapart methodically deconstructed Le Point’s narrative on the Sarkozy–Kadhafi affair, r/france didn’t debate the footnotes—it questioned the newsroom incentives. The broader takeaway is not that one outlet wins; it’s that the audience now assumes political memory will be outsourced to apps, archives, and accountability hobbyists because institutions keep failing at the basics.
Systems Readiness: From PCs to Ports, Obsolescence Is Policy
While the political class argues over principles, volunteers fight entropy. A national campaign is mobilizing to salvage millions of PCs by pivoting from end-of-life Windows to Linux and free software, a grassroots solution to state indifference and proprietary lock-in. The irony is brutal: the same ecosystem that can orchestrate hundreds of migration events can’t keep a basic government app current, as shown by the widely-shared frustration with amendes.gouv failing on modern Android.
"Call for tenders, launch the app, champagne; then maintenance costs get cut, contracts lapse, the app ages; new tender, ‘it’s too old, we must redevelop,’ champagne again (but not for the taxpayer)." - u/Poney33 (87 points)
Security tells the same story at a different scale: Europe’s sanction regime is only as strong as its enforcement, and France’s move to detain a Russian “ghost fleet” tanker off Saint-Nazaire shows how quickly tech, law, and geopolitics collide. From household computers to shadow fleets, the question is identical: do we act before systems decay—or wait until failure forces us to improvise with soldiers on decks and volunteers at install fests?