Recently, several photos of the city of Paris have swept across the web! Unlike the Eiffel Tower, the Seine River, the Champs Elysées and other beautiful scenery, the French capital is now littered with garbage, dirty waterways and messy graffiti, so much so that the external network launched the topic of ##saccageparis.
Is France so big that there are no people to sweep up the garbage? Not only that, behind the dirty mess, in fact, there is a huge crisis that Europe has faced in recent years!
Why is there so much garbage? No one! No more money!
Cold knowledge! According to a statistic from france's Ministry of the Interior– 40% of French men still have the habit of urinating on the ground! Paris, where 20% of the French population is concentrated, is the hardest hit area for urinating everywhere!
Many intellectuals describe Paris as a dream city, a place of mythology, but Parisians themselves do not agree with this, ordinary people walk their dogs and defecate on the street, throwing garbage with their hands.
It is said that many Japanese people came to Paris with unparalleled imagination, only to find that the difference between the real Paris and the propaganda in the East was too great, which led to nausea, insomnia, convulsions and inexplicable feelings of fear, inferiority, and even suicidal tendencies. Because of the sheer numbers, Hiroaki Ota, a Japanese psychologist based in France, called it "Paris Syndrome."
Why is Paris so dirty? Because of the high labor cost and high land price, cleaning up garbage has become an unaffordable financial burden.
According to Pierre Isberger, director of the technical department of the MDS, the Paris region has 7,000 tons of garbage per day, but there is only 1 landfill in the entire region, so one-third of the waste is recycled and the rest is used for incineration to generate electricity.
And that's not counting the feces produced by humans and animals. There are only 140 public toilets in paris, but there are 30,000 tramps, 300,000 dogs, 80,000 pigeons, and at least 8 million rats, and the excrement and urine farts produced each year are estimated to be as high as the Eiffel Tower.
Of course, Parisians have also thought of ways, such as the "Love Paris Sanitation Campaign" and "Declare War on Cigarette Butts" and other activities, which resulted in spending 4.5 million euros a year, and nothing was obvious, but increased the burden on sanitation workers.
At the same time, France has been implementing a high welfare policy, in June 1998, France passed the 35-hour work week bill, plus 35 statutory paid holidays, calculated down, the French only work 188 days a year, and basically are iron rice bowls, so the sanitation company is very cautious about the increase in jobs, and will not ask more people to share.
On the other hand, France's economic growth rate fell from an average of 2.3% per year from 1974 to 2007 to an average of 0.3% per year from 2008 to 2013, and in the social sphere, the Unemployment Rate in France has been rising, soaring from 4.3% in 1976 to 10.1%, and the landlords' families have no surplus food, so President Macron decided to adjust the social welfare policy.
In this way, the sanitation workers increased their workload, the money was less, and they directly went on strike, and the garbage was put on the ground.
Industries are moving outwards, and fertility is declining
Some people will think that the garbage siege is not a "big deal"? Not at all. To some extent, the way garbage is disposed of is also a symbol of a country's national strength.
At a time of rapid economic development, France was one of the first countries in Europe to introduce a garbage sorting system. As early as 1884, the Paris municipal government stipulated that all streets must set up public garbage cans, and took this as an opportunity to gradually establish a system of garbage classification and throwing, which was divided into three categories: the first type of glass and porcelain pieces of garbage; the second type was paper, plastic, aluminum cans and other recyclable garbage; the third type was other garbage.
Doesn't that sound familiar? Yes, almost every country will pay great attention to environmental issues after development, such as Germany and Japan, and the implementation of garbage classification is at the time of its economic take-off.
France is one of the most developed industrial countries, ranking the world leader in nuclear power, aviation, aerospace and railways, and steel, automobiles and construction are the three pillars of its industry. But with the rapid development of science and technology, the rapid rise of the Internet industry, the world's funds are being redistributed, and France's advantages are being weakened!
What is even more frightening is that France's tax burden is one of the largest in the world, with a mandatory tax rate of 46.1%, which is 10% higher than the global average tax rate. With globalization and technological development, more and more companies have chosen to move out of France, set their registers in areas with lower tax burdens, reduce jobs and pay taxes. This has left France with an imbalance in fiscal balance and a climb in public debt as a share of GDP, at 98.5% in 2017. 5%, 98.4% in 2018 and 100.4% at the end of September 2019, the highest level since 1945.
Some people may say that France will reduce taxes and attract companies back. In fact, it is a symptom rather than a cure. According to the French National Statistical Office, the average annual growth rate of the French population from 2013 to 2018 was only 0.4%, compared with 0.5% in the previous five years (0.7% in 1999-2007).
France's population growth continues, but the rate of growth is getting slower, and the post-World War II baby boom has reached retirement age, so aging is on the way, the total number of workers has been greatly reduced, and labor costs continue to be high.
Ironically, many companies have moved their jobs out of the country because of high labor costs, resulting in a soaring unemployment rate, which further increases the government's financial pressure on unemployment benefits, and thus falls into a dead cycle of internal rolls.
This is not an isolated case, this is a common crisis facing Europe!
The garbage siege of Paris has resonated with many European netizens. In the past, with the help of technological advantages, the developed countries developed rapidly, so they put forward the concept of a high-welfare society, which looked like flowers and flowers, everyone lived and worked in peace, and the external propaganda was ancient streets, idyllic afternoon tea and happy work.
At the same time, highly educated people who enjoy life have chosen to "not have children" and count on the country's pension policy. France's fertility rate is only 1.87, but it is already a high number among European countries, with Italy and Spain both around 1.3.
With the shrinking of the working population, the rise of labor costs, coupled with the shortage of consumer population, economic growth has slowed. At this time, high welfare becomes a burden, if welfare is weakened, a large number of people will fall into poverty, and if welfare is not weakened, the state finances will not be able to bear it.
Realizing this, European countries have introduced relaxed immigration laws in an attempt to turn the tide. Portugal, for example, enjoys a "resettled" resettlement fee of 6,000 euros per household in order to attract expatriates, and Germany absorbs a large number of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East – according to Eurostat, Poland lost 268,000 young people aged 20 to 34 in 2013-2017, compared with 492,000 more in Germany during this period.
As for the results? I'm afraid it will take time to confirm.
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