Budget 2027: growth is letting us down, but the effort will be on time

According to Libération, the draft finance bill for 2027, presented in early October and currently being examined by the National Assembly, rests on economic forecasts that are growing less and less credible. The culprit: sluggish growth. The daily writes that the executive will have to step up its efforts if it wants to meet its target of bringing the deficit down to 5%. The details of the additional savings, their amount and how they will be distributed do not appear in the material available to us: we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, a remark on style: growth is "sluggish", it "drags down" the copy. Here is a growth endowed with weight and a mood, like a tired schoolboy. It is the fetishism of the commodity applied to national accounts: a figure acts, and decisions no longer seem to have authors. Yet sluggish growth is first and foremost companies that invest little and hire little, and households whose purchasing power is not enough to absorb what is produced. Choices, then, made by identifiable people, not a weather phenomenon.

Second remark: the budget's scenario is itself a very political choice. Building revenue on hoped-for growth amounts to promising the debt markets that balance will come on its own. When it does not, the bill is not shared out at random. In the logic described by the Marxist tradition, the state manages the common affairs of the propertied class: its room for manoeuvre is bounded by the need to let capital accumulate and to reassure those who lend to it. The deficit is then corrected through whatever is compressible: public spending, services, benefits. Rarely through what pays off for the holders of capital.

One can also ask why growth refuses to cooperate. The classic hypothesis in Marx: competition pushes firms to produce more than can be sold at a profit, and to replace labour with machines, which erodes profitability. We do not claim that this mechanism alone explains the French situation; the dispatch says nothing about it. But it is a reminder that "sluggishness" is not necessarily an accident to be corrected with a better spreadsheet: it may be the symptom of capital struggling to find where to invest profitably.

That leaves employees, the usual adjustment variable. If austerity increases, the question will be the same as always: who pays for the return to 5%? Workers, who control neither the forecasts nor the investment, risk paying for the mistakes of an exercise to which they were never invited.

The Assembly continues its examination. We will soon know whether the government corrects its figures or, more probably, its spending. In either case, the paper will be handed back. The question remains who will be marked, and who will pay for the detention hours.