Seven installments have set out what the Institut Thomas More report documents, without ever endorsing it. This one changes register: it is the only one where this site speaks in its own name. I first restate honestly what the authors themselves draw from their fifty decisions. Then I lay out what I believe the report doesn’t say - a mechanism it documents without naming, a loop it closes badly, an injustice it only half sees. I mark two disagreements, on the wealth tax and on pension funds. And on the three points where this series touches this site’s red line - Creil, marriage, EVARS - I say, once and for all, where I stand.
Twelve lessons
Twelve lessons, in the report’s own words, page 13: “Trois erreurs, trois illusions, quatre menaces, une alerte et un espoir : nous proposons douze courts enseignements, à méditer par quiconque souhaite préparer le redressement de notre pays.” (“Three errors, three illusions, four threats, one warning and one hope: we offer twelve short lessons, for anyone who wants to help prepare our country’s recovery.”) The three errors concern how France read the world: globalization received as a virtue in itself rather than as the return of power politics between nations; a European project whose nature changed, from the Single European Act to the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, without any common sovereignty gained in exchange for the sovereignty ceded; and the refusal, documented as early as Creil in 1989, to see that Islam is at once a religion, a legal code and a political force. The three illusions concern what the state can actually do: the inconsistency between the external commitments France signed and its domestic economic choices, the continuous expansion of spending and regulation without any gain in efficiency, and a kind of legislative restlessness - some thirty initiatives against unemployment, roughly twenty school reforms in fifty years - that paralyzes more than it resolves.
The four threats target democracy itself: a sense of dispossession, a loss of trust in public action, a weakening of local democracy, and a responsibility the report places chiefly on political leaders rather than on citizens. The warning, eleventh lesson, notes that the right almost never rolls back the left’s reforms. The hope, twelfth and last, fits in one sentence: proportional to the scale of the errors committed, the authors argue, is the scale of the potential rebound. I restate these twelve points without irony. They hold up on paper, and a good part of them holds up under scrutiny.
The Ouroboros, the key the report never gives
The report lines up fifty decisions, dated, sourced, chronological. What it never does is give the mechanism behind them. Fifty entries do not make a demonstration; they lack the thread running through them.
Here is mine. A system that, with each decision, produces the conditions for a still heavier system - and feeds on its own effects to reproduce itself, indefinitely. France’s last budget surplus dates to 1974. Since then, every deficit has called for a loan, every loan an interest charge, every charge a need for new revenue, every new revenue stream a fresh administrative layer to collect and redistribute it.
The millefeuille is measurable. France has roughly 480 different taxes, duties, contributions and social charges, according to IFRAP (the French tax-policy institute) - the report itself writes “environ 480” (“roughly 480”) where the very title of that same source, published in 2021, counts 483 - one more discrepancy between the report and its own source. The Cour des comptes (national audit office), for its part, counts more than 465 “niches fiscales” (tax loopholes) in a 2023 report on steering tax expenditure, plus 243 further taxes whose combined yield is below €175 million, in a 2025 report. The report also asserts, without sourcing it, that roughly 40% of working people fund today’s “système France.”
Debt now stands at 115% of GDP, €3.4 trillion, with an interest bill of €54.4 billion in 2025 - close to 10% of state spending. This is not an accident repeated fifty times: it is a system that loops back on itself, it never clears the effects it produces - it absorbs them and turns them into justification for its own expansion. The report documents every layer of that millefeuille without ever saying it is one and the same mechanism, repeated fifty times over.
The demographic loop
The report treats, in two separate chapters, the 1976 easing of family reunification and the 2015 end of universal family benefits. It never connects them. Here is the loop they form.
Starting in 2015, family benefits were cut for well-off households, the quotient familial (family-based tax-splitting mechanism) lowered, the birth bonus reduced from the second child on. The fertility rate, at 1.97 children per woman in 2014, fell to 1.56 in 2025 - its lowest level since the First World War. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, France’s natural population balance turned negative in 2025: minus six thousand, according to INSEE’s demographic report published in early 2026 - 645,000 births against 651,000 deaths. Total population kept growing regardless, by 0.25% over one year as of 1 January 2026: immigration closes the gap. A pension system calibrated on the baby-boom age pyramid needs working-age people to stay solvent; when the birth rate no longer supplies them, they have to be brought in. The UN’s population division modeled this as early as 2000, in a report whose title states the question outright - Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations? - and which calculates, country by country, the migration flows that would be needed just to hold support ratios steady. Cut family policy, and a generation later you get a migration need. The report documents both ends of the chain; it never closes the loop.
The double injustice of low-cost globalization
On exemptions from employer social contributions, the report documents a mechanism it rightly condemns: since 1993, France has subsidized low-skilled employment instead of defending its high-value-added industries, at the very moment it was opening up to competition from low-cost countries. Reductions on low wages rose from €20.9 billion in 2014 to €77.3 billion in 2024 - a threefold increase. The report calls it a “trappe à pauvreté” (“poverty trap”). It’s right.
But it stops halfway. Low-cost globalization inflicts a double injustice, not one. It strips the country of departure of its most productive workforce, and it keeps, in the country of arrival, underpaid jobs later justified with a rhetorical question - who’ll take out the bins, who’ll care for the elderly. This is neither the position of the liberal right, which would rather push labor costs lower still, nor that of the left, which compensates through redistribution without ever touching the wage itself. Mine is simpler: revalue these trades, pay them properly, instead of endlessly subsidizing their under-payment. This isn’t an added act of charity. It’s ending the practice of using public money to keep the price of labor too low to live on with dignity.
Where I part ways with the Institute
On two points, my disagreement isn’t a matter of posture - it’s a matter of degree.
The wealth tax, first. The principle of progressive taxation is sound, and higher incomes should contribute more. But these are taxpayers already taxed at 45% on the top income-tax bracket, in the most heavily taxed country in the OECD. Past a certain threshold, those who can leave do leave, and the yield collapses: the report itself documents roughly 19,000 taxpayers who left France between 1982 and 2018, taking €72 billion in assets with them, for an annual yield of barely €5 billion.
Pension funds, next. The report’s sovereigntist diagnosis of the 1986 privatizations is correct: France privatized without building major national institutional investors, and non-residents now hold more than 40% of listed French shares, more than half of the CAC 40. On the privatizations themselves, my own phrase is harsher than the report’s: pure corruption. But the remedy it proposes isn’t right. Handing French pension savings to pension funds just swaps one dependency for another - transferring power over our companies not to foreign shareholders any more, but to asset managers whose horizon is the quarterly return. The problem isn’t a shortage of French pension funds. It’s that capital was allowed to leave without ever building the instrument that would have kept it here another way - a matter of political will, not financial vehicles.
The three sensitive points
Three decisions in this series touch this site’s red line. The facts are in earlier installments - Creil in the third, marriage and EVARS in the second. Here is where I stand.
On Creil (1989). “L’assimilation est le seul processus réel : on entre dans une civilisation en cessant d’appartenir à celle qu’on quitte. Elle a fonctionné en France sur les Polonais, les Italiens, les Espagnols, les Portugais, les Arméniens. Elle a une limite, et cette limite est la distance entre les deux ordres. Le christianisme latin a séparé le spirituel du temporel ; l’islam ne l’a pas fait, la loi révélée y est aussi un ordre juridique et politique. Au-delà d’une certaine distance, il ne reste que trois issues : l’assimilation complète, la coexistence séparée, ou la fabrication d’un troisième terme où ni l’un ni l’autre ne subsiste. La France prétend depuis trente-cinq ans qu’il en existe une quatrième. C’est cette prétention que l’affaire de Creil inaugure.” (“Assimilation is the only real process: you enter a civilization by ceasing to belong to the one you’re leaving. It has worked in France on the Polish, the Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Armenians. It has a limit, and that limit is the distance between the two orders. Latin Christianity separated the spiritual from the temporal; Islam never did - revealed law is also a legal and political order there. Past a certain distance, only three outcomes remain: full assimilation, separate coexistence, or the manufacture of a third term in which neither survives. France has claimed, for thirty-five years, that a fourth exists. That is the claim the Creil affair inaugurates.”)
On marriage for same-sex couples, 17 May 2013. “Le mariage civil est un contrat. À ce titre, l’ouvrir à deux hommes ou deux femmes ne retire rien à personne, et surtout pas à moi. Mais ce contrat prolongeait une institution dont l’objet était la filiation. Une union qui ne peut pas engendrer n’occupe pas la même place anthropologique - ce n’est pas une infériorité, c’est une différence, et on a choisi de ne pas la nommer. Le mot « égalité » a permis de ne pas dire qu’on ne modifiait pas le périmètre de l’institution, mais sa définition.” (“Civil marriage is a contract. As such, opening it to two men or two women takes nothing away from anyone, least of all from me. But this contract extended an institution whose purpose was lineage. A union that cannot produce offspring does not occupy the same anthropological place - this is not an inferiority, it is a difference, and we chose not to name it. The word ‘equality’ let us avoid saying that we were not changing the institution’s scope, but its definition.”)
On EVARS, 3 February 2025. “Un État qui n’arrive plus à apprendre à lire à un enfant sur cinq à l’entrée en sixième se dote d’un programme national sur la vie affective. L’ordre des priorités se discute. Mais le fond est ailleurs : sur l’intime, la famille est légitime et l’école ne l’est qu’à titre subsidiaire. En inversant ce rapport, on ne comble pas un manque - on décide que l’enfance est un terrain d’intervention publique. Ils auront toute leur vie pour découvrir ce qu’est une relation. Ils n’auront qu’une enfance.” (“A state that can no longer teach one child in five to read by the start of middle school gives itself a national curriculum on emotional life. The order of priorities is debatable. But the real issue lies elsewhere: on intimate matters, the family holds legitimacy, and the school only a subsidiary role. By reversing that relationship, we do not fill a gap - we decide that childhood is a field for public intervention. They will have their whole lives to discover what a relationship is. They will only ever have one childhood.”)
What remains, once the report is closed
The report documents fifty decisions with a rigor this series has checked, installment by installment. What it doesn’t do is connect them: show that they obey the same mechanism, that demographics and family policy answer each other, that low-cost globalization inflicts two injustices where it sees only one. On the wealth tax and pension funds, the report’s diagnosis is right; the scale of its remedy isn’t. On the three most sensitive subjects of this half-century, I have said where I stand, without hedging and without dressing it up. This was the only installment where this site could do that in its own name.
This eight-part series offers an outside reading of the report - it is not a publication of the Institut Thomas More. Read the full report (PDF, 112 pages, in French) - 1975-2025 : les 50 décisions qui ont coulé la France, coordinated by Jean de Belot, Tarick Dali and Jean-Thomas Lesueur, Institut Thomas More, June 2026.
