GDP protects the rich

Gross Domestic Product ignores all collateral and consequential damage (eg pollution/global warming costs). It is a broad brush that reveals nothing useful to most.

Up to now, the better social services in France make sense out of paying taxes, which are essential to any sane society, especially if well used by its government.

Sadly, the tendency to privatise essential social services puts France on the same course we have seen in the UK since Thatcherism. In short, privatisation of social services which uses our taxes to enrich private faceless shareholders.

It may be more useful, in this gilets jaunes age, to have tax levels broken down as a percentage of income and wealth by groupings (such as the 5% highest total incomes as a percentage of gross worldwide wealth, going down by 5% or 10% steps to the lowest 5%-unemployed).

Last year, the “patrons” of CAC40 gave themselves 14% annual increases on huge figures. City of London Stock market bosses did better, at 25%.

Then, instead of expressing our sense of injustice by inconveniencing fellow gilets jaunes, we can all be gilets jaunes targeting the real villains in our increasingly divided free market capitalist societies.

I have always gladly declared and paid all my taxes both in the UK (from 1954, age 18), and now in France since 2000 where I live as a French citizen.

I enjoy an adequate pension and comfortable life here but feel that the pursuit of never-ending
economic growth is being outpaced by the increasing need for more and more charities to deal with the victims of the greedy few and their political allies.

Brian Hurley, Dordogne