The French PM is resigning.

[Biloute]

@MAD87:
Referenda are expensive because they're done the "old-fashioned way," with paper, envelopes, people traveling, and others spending hours counting and checking.
With well-designed software, all this could be done online. Of course, it would be necessary to be vigilant during the design regarding cheating, but the SNCF, taxes, Amazon, the healthcare system, and others already exist and work quite well. Few people today don't own a smartphone or laptop: those could get help from family or, at worst, from the town hall. This would be much easier for people who are far from home, who work on Sundays, or who have difficulty walking!
The only question is: does the government really want to do what the people are asking? The answer is clearly NO when we see what happened during the last referendum in 2005 (20 years ago!) concerning the European Constitution. The French had voted NO overwhelmingly and, shortly after, Sarkozy had triggered the Lisbon Treaty which imposed, without a vote, the same thing against the people's wishes!

[Biloute]

@Blaze:
It's true that taxes are important, but where do they come from?

facture_electricite_repartition.jpg

- The CSPE is a tax for the development of renewable energies (wind and solar). With our nuclear power, we absolutely didn't need these things: 16% less taxes! It was the Germans who forced us to reduce nuclear power to install renewables, to the point that we closed two stations in Fessenheim! Fortunately, Macron recently restarted nuclear development, but we wasted a lot of time and money!
- The TURPE is a tax on electricity transmission: it exists mainly to connect windmills in the middle of nowhere to the grid: without them, 32% less taxes!
- The European single energy market indexes the selling price to the price of the most expensive energy. In other words, the French pay for their nuclear electricity at the price of German gas electricity, which is much more expensive (even more so since the sanctions against Putin).

[Blaze]

@Biloute - I actually meant domestic electricity bills. The initial price of the electricity is not unreasonable, but once you start adding TVA at 20%, CTA and any other taxes (can't remember without the bill in front of me), the price rises dramatically.

[Hotrodder]

- the people should be consulted more often by referendum on important issues.

UK's referendum of 2016 didn't work out all that well. Given the lies in the media the racists and ultra-nationalists pushed the results to a very narrow majority to leave the EU. The more intelligent in the population thought it was such a silly idea that they didn't turn out to vote against it. Something like 17% of voters even bothered. And now that the dust has settled we can all see how the UK economy all this time later still hasn't recovered. Only the banks and related financial interests have come out on top. Everyone else has suffered.

[Blaze]

Tomorrow is going to be a big demonstration day and in this area, the aim is to block everything, hang about on roundabouts and do an escargot between Rennes and Saint Malo.
They even intend having some sort of fête opn some of the roundabouts ....
Why ? What do they hope to achieve ? Bayrou is out - is it Macron they want out ? If he does decide to go for a general election, I doubt it's such demos that will persuade him.
There's another one planned for the 18th

[Biloute]

@ Blaze :
The "block everything" operation had been organized long before Bayrou asked Parliament to kindly fire him!!!
Why would they cancel it? First, past the post...
But tomorrow, the far left plans to jump on the bandwagon, and things could very well go wrong.

[Blaze]

But tomorrow, the far left plans to jump on the bandwagon, and things could very well go wrong.

I think you and I are in total agreement about that !

I see that Sébastien Lecornu's got the job. We can only wait and see ....

[exile]

The problem with referenda is, as @Hotrodder has pointed out, the promises are rarely achievable in the way that is promised.

If you held a referendum tomorrow to reduce personal taxes, I would bet you would get an overwhelming yes vote.
But then the health service would struggle
SNCF would go bust and most trains would stop.
Policing would become sparse
Teaching jobs would have to be slashed.

and so on.

Brexit promised
sovereignty - but the UK is still beholden to international fuel prices and the borders have been shown to be porous. Sending people back across the Channel became impossible.
Lower taxes - taxes went up
Lower cost of living - Power, food etc have gone up sharply
Less bureaucracy for business - who now struggle with additional paperwork and especially with their major market - the EU

and so on

Switzerland does seem to have got referenda right but perhaps that is because they have several every year and the electorate are now wise to the false promises and unachievable dream projects.

[Biloute]

@Blaze :
The graph I showed in my post accurately represents the cost breakdown of a €250 domestic electricity bill !
If we add the CSPE and the TURPE, that's 16 + 32 = 48% of taxes that were created to finance wind turbines and solar panels (please, reread my post).
If we hadn't started developing them to comply with the EU, we wouldn't need to pay these two taxes: 48% less on a bill, and this one is almost halved !!!
Look at this site for the breakdown of electricity types in France over a day:
https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-p ... ar-filiere
We can see that solar panels only produce electricity when there's a lot of sun (how strange !). Since everything produced MUST be consumed, nuclear power plants must then be slowed down. But a nuclear power plant operating at idle consumes almost as much fuel as one operating at 100% (this is an engineer speaking...).
So, what's the point of promoting these renewable energies that we don't even know how to control since nature decides ?

[Biloute]

- the people should be consulted more often by referendum on important issues.

UK's referendum of 2016 didn't work out all that well. Given the lies in the media the racists and ultra-nationalists pushed the results to a very narrow majority to leave the EU. The more intelligent in the population thought it was such a silly idea that they didn't turn out to vote against it. Something like 17% of voters even bothered. And now that the dust has settled we can all see how the UK economy all this time later still hasn't recovered. Only the banks and related financial interests have come out on top. Everyone else has suffered.

@Hotrodder:
According to Wikipedia, 72% of voters turned out to vote (not 17 !)
BTW, is it really a sign of intelligence not to vote when the issue is so crucial ?
On the other hand, once the people have spoken, the government still needs to do everything necessary to respect that decision and not sabotage it so it can then say the people were wrong... What was the government's real attitude following the Brexit referendum ? (I'm just asking...)