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“Let them eat cake.”
It is almost universally thought that Marie Antoinette said the above quote in response to her subjects’ suffering. But surprise! She apparently never said it. No matter. Every schoolchild forced to take European history knows the story anyway: A queen so out of touch with her starving subjects that she tells them to swap bread for tastier carbs with money they don’t have. Her (not historically accurate) advice was not well-received and Marie? Well, she lost her title and her head for it.
I bring up dear Marie because there’s a new version of the story playing out in the towns and cities in Europe as I write this Substack. Simultaneously, in the US almost every Republican attack ad playing on TV or the radio this election has some version of “[insert name] is a socialist!” This time it has nothing to do with a queen, but rather government budgets. And the people being told to eat cake aren’t peasants, but rather, kids. We start in France.
Since late September, French high school students (recently joined by labor unions and other supporters) have been blockading their schools and protesting in the streets. Why? Well, it’s not over a rec center in New Granada, Colorado. Nor is it about a four-day school week. Instead, it’s about the lack of teachers, missing desks, and the dilapidated school facilities that double as saunas during heatwaves driven by climate change. As one student told reporters, “The building is falling apart, the cafeteria is too small. There’s zero budget, zero resources, not enough supervisors.”
At its peak, the protests have affected over half of the country’s upper secondary schools. And the French government responded the only way it knows: Riot police, tear gas, rubber bullets, and water hoses. The French Interior Ministry reports over 6,000 arrests since the protests began.
The problem for France is that they don’t really have the money to pay for what the kids need and deserve. Some brief history about the profligate nature of the French state: The country hasn’t balanced a budget since the 1970s. The country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is currently about 120% while its budget deficit - that’s the difference between how much revenue the government generates versus what it spends – is projected to be €130 billion. And the financiers are starting to take notice: The interest rate France pays on its government debt has soared to its highest since 2002 and doesn’t show signs of abating. Think about that. For those that remember, during the height of the Eurozone crisis in 2008 – when there was a real fear that the Eurozone would collapse – France was running a deficit but still paying less on its debt then than it pays today. Wild.
The lame duck French finance minister is now saying the 2027 budget needs €54 billion in cuts. So somebody or some group is gonna take the hit. But here’s the question no politician has the backbone to answer: Who? At the heart of the problem is the generous nature of government subsidies. Reuters dug through hundreds of pages of French budget data – thanks Reuters! – and found that roughly €90 billion earmarked for the school system in 2026 goes to pension contributions. This is about 28% of the budget earmarked for education. So put another way, more than a quarter of the budget goes to people who are retired; not kids and teachers sitting in a classroom. Or let me put it one more way: The money labeled “education” is in fact being spent on retirement. And when the bill comes due, the government protects the retirees to the detriment of the students. There’s nothing wrong with that per se. But, let’s not mislabel the evidence either.
The kids aren’t stupid; they know what’s waiting for them on the other side of graduation. The country’s unemployment rate for 15-to-24-year-olds hit 21.6% this spring while overall unemployment climbed to its highest level since 2020. So when a teenager blockades her lycée, she’s not just mad that she doesn’t have a math teacher. She’s looking at a country that underfunds her school today and has no job for her tomorrow, while at the same time promising her grandparents’ generation that nothing will change.
Travel a few hundred miles east and you see something else that certainly rhymes with the events in France. On September 6, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won 43.8% of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. For reference, that’s more than double the party’s performance five years ago. Two weeks later, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD scored 38% of the vote while Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party – the CDU – hovered around 5%. And nationally the AfD has led in polls for most of the year, hitting 29% in May. Merz described the recent election results as a “disaster.” Take note, readers. Almost a hundred years since the Nazis took power, the Far Right is again ascending in Germany.
Dig into the data some, and here’s the part that should keep every mainstream politician in Europe up at night. Among voters under 30 in Saxony-Anhalt, roughly four in ten backed the AfD. The CDU’s share? About 5%. In fairness, the AfD’s biggest bloc was middle-aged voters, about 52% of 35-to-59-year-olds, so this isn’t exactly a story about the rebellious youth. Nonetheless, the mainstream parties are now almost getting shut out with young voters.
Why? The pundits will bring up the same things: Immigration, the disjointed nature of reunification, or Chinese industry. But I’d say that’s not the whole story. Last year, the German national government passed a pension package locking the benchmark pension level at 48% of average income through 2031. A group of young CDU lawmakers threatened to vote no because of the financial burden it dumps on their generation. Party leadership reportedly leaned on them hard and the package barely passed. The result? In the 2026 federal budget, subsidies to the state pension system run about €127.8 billion which equates to roughly a quarter of all spending. So if you’re 22 in Magdeburg, the mainstream parties just told you that your parents’ retirement is locked in, but yours? We’ll get back to you…later.
Let me be clear: The AfD is not the answer. This is a party whose Saxony-Anhalt branch – the branch that just scored the dominating election victory – is classified by the state’s own domestic intelligence service as right-wing extremist. But as history has taught us too many times, when the Center refuses to make hard choices, it leaves the field wide open for those that will happily sell bullshit to the masses. And those masses, particularly the young, are getting desperate. Don’t believe me? A 2026 study surveyed about 2,000 Germans aged 14 to 29 and the answers were sobering. About 41% of those surveyed said they are considering leaving the country for good; nearly a quarter of respondents also reported being in debt up from 16% in 2023, and roughly 30% say they need professional help for their mental health, five points higher than a year earlier. Across the EU, young people now don’t leave their parents’ home until age 26; in Italy and Spain, it’s past 30. The kids are stuck.
Which brings me to America and why we should give a damn about French teenagers and German state elections. In short, our government is running the same playbook. According to a recent analysis, in 2024 the federal government spent about $40,050 per adult 65 and older, but only $6,860 per child. In total, children got about 8% of the entire federal budget.
And our kids – like their peers in Europe – aren’t stupid. In Harvard’s fall 2025 Youth Poll, 43% of Americans aged 18 to 29 said they’re struggling or getting by with only limited financial security. Separately, the typical first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old. When the National Association of Realtors started tracking this stat in 1981, it was 29. Even the kids that got college degrees aren’t safe: Unemployment for that group sits at 5.6%, while student loan interest keeps accruing. And I haven’t even touched AI and the anxiety that is creating for this group.
And what has Washington done with this news? They’ve made it worse, of course! Of particular import, all while passing blowout budgets, Republicans refuse to raise taxes on the rich because they say that group pays more than their fair share. And technically, the top 1%’s share of federal taxes has gone up, from 14% in 1979 to 27% in 2022. But don’t fall for the sleight of hand. Over the same period, their share of the nation’s income doubled, from 9% to 18%. They pay a bigger slice because … they’re making shitpots of money. And finally, the marginal tax rate they pay keeps heading in one direction. The top income tax rate was 70% in 1980, but today it’s 37%, and last year’s Big Bullshit Bill made that rate permanent. And for the extremely wealthy, it’s even more lopsided. A 2021 government analysis found the 400 wealthiest families paid an average federal income tax rate of just 8.2% from 2010 to 2018. Good grief, Charlie Brown. And if you think I’m giving Democrats a pass, I’m not. When they held the levers of power, they either extended tax cuts or took no action. Somewhere Master Yoda is shaking his head, mumbling “Cheap, words are. Precious, actions be.”
Social Security has its own unique version of this fakakta game. And social security is particularly important because the game can’t be ignored any further. The payroll tax that funds social security stops at $184,500. When Congress last “fixed” Social Security in 1983, 90% of all wages fell under the cap. By 2021, as the top pulled away from everyone else, that had dropped to 81.4%, the lowest since 1972. According to one study, that drop left the trust fund roughly $1.4 trillion poorer.
And the reckoning has now come. It now seems that sometime in 2034 – whether Washington likes it or not – the social security trust fund will run dry. At that time, Congress has three choices: cut every retiree’s check by about 17% overnight, raise taxes on working people who are already stretched way too thin, or ask the people who’ve been collecting tax cuts for 40 years to finally chip in. Which means our politicians in less than eight years will have to answer a question they’ve dodged for decades: Do we keep protecting the 1%?
Both parties treat Social Security like the third rail, because older Americans vote and younger Americans usually don’t. I get it; nobody likes political suicide. But “we’ll deal with it later” isn’t a policy. My husband would call this a fraudulent conveyance in his bankruptcy universe: Move the assets to one generation and leave the next one holding the debt. So what do we do? I’m not here to tell you to cut Nana’s check. Nana worked, Nana paid in, and Nana is owed. Factor in that Nana’s healthcare is being cut by these Republican asshole legislators, and Nana likely needs that money just to survive. So bottom-line, don’t mess with Nana. But whether we like it or not, we’re gonna need some adults in the room. And those adult are gonna have to pass legislation that makes those who can afford to pay their share while simultaneously stopping the charity to the top 1%.
But that still does not solve the discontent of today’s youth. On that point, the solutions are simple, but politically difficult. At bottom, it means that our government invests in the young like it means it: Affordable schools, child care for working families, and affordable housing. On education, rethink student loan financing and how those loans get paid back.
Do this not as charity, but because the kids are the pension plan for the rest of us. Well-educated young people who can afford to start families are the ones who pay for everybody’s retirement. To accomplish this requires hard choices; in many ways it is a zero-sum game. If you focus on expanding government benefits to the young, there will be a reduction in benefits elsewhere absent expanding government revenues (TAXES!).
But that’s the job. Governments that refuse to make hard decisions don’t avoid them in the end; they just hand them to someone worse down the road. That’s exactly what is happening now in Europe with the AfD now looking to take control and Marie le Pen and her brand of racism in France being favored to win the next national election. In the end, although Marie Antoinette may have never said “let them eat cake”, Western governments are saying it to their younger citizens every single day.
Don’t be surprised then if they’re in the streets in the not too distant future carrying pitchforks.
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