David Friedberg reveals France's public spending is 57% of GDP: greater than that of communist countries "This chart is a measure of public spending as a percent of GDP; Rand Group Research published it. And you can see the comparison of France's public spending as a percent of GDP, to the peak public spending as a percent of GDP of major communist nations, Soviet Union during, communist Romania, Venezuela under Chavez, and then communist China." "It certainly been a socialist state, right? That's my point. I think this is such a precious lesson for the West to look at. We all think that there's some political problem with Macron or whoever it was." "The more the government spends, the worse the conditions get for its people, not the opposite. And then the people riot and revolt and say that the government's not spending enough and the government needs to be doing more." "Take a guess where the US is today. Federal government spending is $7.4 trillion, state and local government spending is $4.6 trillion. You add those two together, it's $12 trillion out of a $33 trillion GDP. US public spending is roughly 36% of GDP. France today is the same as the US, it's about 120% debt to GDP." "France today is operating its national government spending deficit is 5.4% of GDP. The US is actually 6.2% of GDP. France is I think probably the first to go because they're only growing their economy at half a percent while the US is growing 2.3%." "So we're still kind of hanging on because we have some degree of economic growth that's allowing us to kind of hold things together." "But I would argue that we are facing the same sort of fiscal cliff that leads to this extraordinary social unrest as France, all the economic measures are aligned, we're at the same rate, we're at the same set of problems."