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So lovely readers, who every you maybe, some of you may know and some of you may not that I am living in Montpellier, France right now. I am living with an excellent family that seems to be very well versed in the french political world and very opinionated as well. This post is from an email that I wrote a few days ago. Naturally, a lot of my posts this year will probably be about my experiances in France and what is going through my head these days. Enjoy! Tell me what you think as well.

So it all started in my grammar class the other day when we had to give an oral presentation in french. One girl gave a presentation on American health insurance versus French health
insurance. Of chores, French health insurance is all public and paid for by the government through French taxes. I will never understand why Americans are so freaking afraid of taxes, not that paying taxes would solve the problem of health care for Americans. The prof was really shocked in class to hear that not all Americans have health care and that it can be really difficult to get, and I was really shocked to learn how little my fellow Americans in the class knew about the situation.

So the whole thing about health insurance really got me to thinking about what has started to become my picture of the American financial life style. We got into a discussion at dinner today that really helped me put it all in to perspective for myself.

Fréderic was talking about French work habits, he told me that the average French person works 35 hours a week, not much less than the average American. The conversation was really about the variances in this number though. He works way more than the average French person. Fleur went on a really passionate rant about how there are a lot of French who don’t work anything close to 35 hours a week and are basically a burden to society (remember the pseudo-homeless I was
telling you about). According to Fleur, because of their decision not to work the rest of French society must work that much harder to make up for it and in turn end up spending extra hours at the office just because of those who don’t want to.

Than Fréderic started to talk about the productivity of the French. According to him (I have no idea if this is a proud Frenchman talking or not) the French are extremely productive (even more than the Japanese was his example), especially when it comes to ground-breaking research and new inventions. The thing is, he said, that most of the French don’t know this and I thought to myself that perhaps that is the reason for their success. Can ignorance be productive sometimes? Anyways, Fréderic supported this claim by saying the reason the French are more productive is because they are such individualists, because they don’t care about anyone but themselves and because they know that no one cares about them, therefore they tell themselves they must do at least one thing to bring them up in the world because no one will do it for them.

So of chores, this got me to thinking about how America compares to this, with regards to the health insurance issue. Yes it is true that Americans work A LOT but it is also true that they are probably less productive than other countries. Perhaps this could be owed up to outsourcing or something like that. It is also true though that it is very hard to work yourself into a better financial situation/social class in America. I was thinking about this earlier today when I. It is such a vicious cycle for us. We may have ambitions to do something with ourselves, to help others, to be a benefit rather than a burden to society, but that all seems like it could come crashing down around use when we
find out we have to pay first to get to where we want to go before being able to make the money that would allow us to earn that money that would allow us to change our lives.

Voilà, the debt. Something I am starting to believe is the STD of the American financial world as far as the individual is concerned, it is handed down by our parents when they teach us to be good people and to get good educations, we catch it through our vices and human desires. We go to college and pay a lot for it, and afterwards most people come out very deeply in debt, a debt that they will probably be paying off for the next 20 years, and when this debt is gone there will still be the health care, the mortgage, blah blah blah. Fréderic was telling me about how debt is a concept that the French don’t understand, to be below the line here basically means you will never
achieve financial stability again and are probably going to be on the street soon.

So, the average American buys their way through school because how else are we supposed to make something of ourselves without a good education? How can we keep ourselves from being a burden to society without going to school? Than after that we work and work and work to pay for what we have already exercised. Vicious cycle number one.