US taxpayers are $80,000 poorer. That's the cost of dispatching a Coast Guard jet and helicopter to a 21-foot, custom-designed rowboat bobbing 150 miles off Cape Cod, where Girard called it quits 10 days into his latest aborted adventure.
As if we could afford such a thing.
Fearful and cold in a menacing fog, Girard used a satellite phone to place an 8:25 a.m. distress call to the Coast Guard in Boston. "I can't do anything," Girard, 28, said in a weak, breaking voice. "I'm cold, and I don't know what to do."
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I say MAKE the FRENCH reimburse us.
"France's largesse insulates many from recession" by Edward Cody, Washington Post | June 7, 2009
MENTON, France - France's version of Miami Beach.... even as the world reels from its most painful economic crisis since the 1930s, Beaufranqui's thoughts have turned not to budget cuts but for Beaufranqui and millions of other French people dependent on tax-financed largesse, this country's cozy social protections, vast numbers of bureaucrats, and unhesitating government intervention have proved to be a shelter from want in these hard economic times.
I heard they also have pretty good health care.
Denounced for decades as a millstone preventing growth and competitiveness, particularly by free-market advocates in the United States, the French government's dominant role in economic activity has suddenly found new favor at home and grudging respect abroad.
The crisis has landed hard in France, just as it has elsewhere. European Union specialists estimated last week that the number of unemployed is likely to rise to more than 3 million by next year as factories close. But the French economy is expected to shrink by just 3 percent, markedly less than in Britain or Italy, largely because of the country's traditionally high level of government spending, they added.
More significant in human terms, broad sectors of the population - bureaucrats, retirees, teachers, and the millions of others whose livelihood depends directly or indirectly on public outlays - find themselves surrounded by a government cushion. The effects are easy to see: As the crisis grew and began to obsess French officialdom in Paris, for instance, Alpine ski resorts reported full bookings for the winter and spring seasons.
Perhaps nowhere has the buffer effect been more evident than in Menton, a Riviera town where a third of the population is retired and the largest employers - City Hall, the hospital, and a municipal casino off the beach - are government-run. Mayor Jean-Claude Guibal, who also represents Menton in the National Assembly, said the city has suffered no large layoffs in the economic crisis for the simple reason that it has no factories to lose; service jobs catering to retired people have endured.
"The retired people constitute an element of stability," Guibal said in an interview in City Hall, at the top of a square sloping toward the sea, shaded by palm trees and ringed by cafe terraces under stucco arcades.
The crisis has been felt here, of course. Fabrice Massiere, a cheese merchant at the Menton Market, said his business was off sharply because the number of visitors has declined. And Guibal said income from the casino and tax revenue on real estate transactions have sunk, forcing him to raise property taxes for the first time in 13 years. But the heavy dependence on government subsidies or official salaries, he added, has helped insulate a large part of the Menton region's 66,000 inhabitants.
Nicolas Veron, a French economic analyst at the Brussels-based Bruegel research foundation, said a crucial point will come when the crisis begins to ease and growth resumes, which European officials predict could happen next year. What seems now to be an advantage protecting many French people from harm, he cautioned, could turn out then to be what free-market promoters argue that it is - a shackle on economic activity.
"It could hurt us then more than it is helping us now," he said.Why do I suspect we are only talking about an elite sliver of French society when they are out in the streets so much?
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I mean, it's not like the selective, agenda-pushing American MSM would ever omit, obfuscate, distort, or deceive, right?
