Europoor discourse enjoyers and China hawks love to talk about how the share of the US in world GDP has remained constant, but that's mostly an illusion resulting from the almost continuous appreciation of the dollar relative to the currencies of the largest economies during the period. If you look at the share of the US in world GDP in PPP, it has been going down exactly as you would expect based on differences in growth rates. Indeed, even with the slowdown in recent years, China is still growing significantly more rapidly than the US. The same thing is true for India and several other large developing countries. So I don't know how you can believe that the US has somehow maintained its share of world GDP without engaging in magical thinking. Even if some developing countries are underperforming, there is still a lot of catching-up happening and it's to be expected that a mature economy will not grow as fast as developing countries.

Treisman in The Return on the lack of Western economic support to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. See also my response to Nuland, who recently lied through her teeth on the topic, for more details about this: philippelemoine.com/p/us-for…. Again, I don't think it was the result of malice as much as the usual boring reasons about short-sighted politicians responding to short-term incentives for the most part, but it's annoying that people continue to talk about the imaginary largesses we supposedly lavished on Russia in the 1990s.

Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign is another counter-example to the claim that prohibition doesn't work. It massively reduced mortality among men, but also crime and various other alcohol-related problems. They only reverted to previous levels after it was abandoned. Sure, it was a huge mistake in the context of the time because it destroyed the consumer market and the state budget, but this was due to the specific Soviet context, with extreme reliance of the budget on the turnover tax for revenue and the rigidity of the planned economy. Excise taxes on alcohol are already pretty high in most developed countries, but as much as I enjoy drinking, there is probably a good case for raising them even more. This is arguably true even in countries that are past the point where the elasticity of tax revenue they generate with respect to the rate has become negative.

This is a very naive take and something Macron literally can't do. First, he doesn't have a majority in parliament since he decided to dissolve it for no reason in 2024 (only to take a beating at the subsequent elections), so he has no way of getting such a fiscal consolidation through parliament. If the parliament can't agree on a budget, the constitution allows the government to implement a budget by decrees, but in that case it's the budget originally proposed by the government that is implemented and it contains no such fiscal consolidation. Also, Macron is currently polling at 15%, so he is probably the most unpopular president in the history of the Fifth Republic. There is a presidential election in a few months and nobody in parliament, not even the members of his own party, is going to commit political seppuku by voting such a thing. Moreover, even if they did, the country would simply ground to a halt as protests and strikes paralyze everything. This would only make the fiscal crisis worse, because if people are not working, they are also not paying taxes. Not to mention that, in such a scenario, the yields on French treasury bonds would explode and the pressure on the French public debt would turn into a full-blown panic. What people need to understand is that, except for the fact that France is not facing a balance of payment crisis but only a fiscal crisis, the French government is in a situation that is kind of similar to the Polish communist party in 1980. It needs to implement austerity, but it lacks the legitimacy to do so and, should it try, it would make things worse because the economy would ground to a halt. We are more fucked than you imagine.