Budget 2026: €3.8bn cut, €3.7bn spent, and the bill is aimed at the same people

According to Le Monde, the government announced on Wednesday 4 November the cancellation of appropriations amounting to €3.8bn. In the same move, it plans €3.7bn of additional spending. According to Bercy, the deficit risks reaching 5.4% of GDP; experts fear worse. The breakdown of the cancelled appropriations and the added spending does not appear in the dispatch we have, so we do not yet know who pays for what. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us do the arithmetic first, which does not take long: 3.8 minus 3.7 leaves €0.1bn. A "final squeeze", the paper's headline calls it, which yields a net saving of a tenth of a billion. We have seen more dramatic squeezes. The real issue, then, is not the amount but the composition: a shaving of budget lines on one side, a top-up elsewhere. In a budget, cutting and spending are two ways of distributing the same constraint, and the Marxist question is always the same: who receives, who collects?

The tradition is well established. The modern state is not a neutral referee: its budgets are shaped by property relations and bounded by the necessity that capital continue to accumulate (our translation). When the deficit becomes a nuisance, nobody questions profits or exemptions; one looks at the appropriations for public services, those that fund schools, hospitals, research and housing. If, as is customary, the cancellations fall on these lines, it will be the wage earner who pays twice: through his taxes, then through the decline of the service he depends on and cannot do without, for lack of the means to buy the private version.

Some will say this is only a hypothesis, and that is true for as long as the list is unpublished. But the mechanism is well known: every crisis is resolved by shifting costs downward. The deficit, presented as a "slippage" (the vocabulary of a badly driven car, never of a class choice), is the product of revenues allowed to drift and of an economy whose profits do not convert sufficiently into investment. The fetishism of the figure does the rest: "5.4%" speaks for itself, as if percentages decided on their own.

Then there is the indirect effect. Fewer public appropriations mean fewer orders, fewer jobs, and unemployment that needs little encouragement to swell and which, by enlarging the reserve army of labour, weighs on the wages of those still in work. Austerity also serves as discipline.

What we now await: the precise breakdown of the €3.8bn, the nature of the €3.7bn in new spending, and the experts' figures judging 5.4% optimistic. Only then will we know whether this squeeze is bookkeeping or policy.