Column: Eliminating national holidays is a promising idea. Start with the racist ones

Believe it or not, France has had a form of social security since the 1600s, and its modern system began seriously in 1910, while the life expectancy of the world was only 32 years old. Today, the average man reaches 75 and for the French, he is 83, among the highest in Europe.

Excellent news for the French, bad news for their pensions.

Because people live longer, mathematics to finance pensions in France are no longer mathematics, and now the country’s debt represents almost 114% of its GDP. Remember that it was a few years ago when the demonstrators set fire to Paris in terms of fires because President Emmanuel Macron proposed to increase the age of legal retirement from 62 to 64 years. Well, now Prime Minister François Bayrou proposed to eliminate two national holidays, to try to respond to the country’s debt.

In 2023, before Paris burned, around 50,000 people in Denmark gathered outside the Parliament to express their anger to drop one of the country’s national celebrations. The roots of the big day of prayer date up to the 1600s. Eliminate it – in the hope of increasing production and tax revenues – brought together unions, political parties and opposite churches in a rare trifecta. This explains why a number of schools and businesses closed its doors for the holidays in 2024 in defiance of the official change.

This week, Bayrou proposed to eliminate Easter Monday from France and the holidays of the victory day, the latter marking the defeat of Nazi Germany. In a Reuters survey, 70% of respondents did not like the idea, we will therefore see if Paris starts to burn again. Or perhaps citizens will inspire the Danes and will not work at the time, even if the government decided to continue business as usual.

Here at home, President Trump also launched the idea of eliminating one of the national holidays. However, because he launched the idea on Juneteenth – via a publication on social networks on “too many non -working holidays” – I will assume that tax revenues were not the only motivation for his comments that day. You know, given its crusade Against business and government’s diversity efforts; her Refusal to apologize for having called for the death penalty for five innocent boys in color; and his approval from the Alligator Alcatraz. However, even if I find myself in disagreement with the president’s remarks in 2025 on the holidays, I agree with what he said about Juneteenth when he was president in 2020: “It is actually an important event, an important moment.”

Indeed.

While the institution of slavery has enabled this country to quickly become a global power, studies show that the most important economic gains in the history of the country come from the end of slavery – otherwise known as juneteenth. Two economists found that the economic gain in the release of slave people was “greater than the introduction of railways, by certain estimates and worth 7 to 60 years of technological innovation in the second half of the 19th century”, ” According to the University of Chicago. For what? Because the final calculations have revealed that the cost to enslave people for centuries was much higher than the economic advantage of their freedom.

In 1492, when Christopher Columbus “discovered America”, civilizations prospered on this land for millennia. The colonizers introduced slavery on these coasts two years before the first “Thanksgiving” in 1621. It was more than 50 years before King Louis XIV began the first pension in France; 60 years before King Christian V approved the big day of prayer; and 157 years before the 13 colonies declared the independence of Great Britain on July 4, 1776.

Of all the national festivals of the Western world, it would seem that Juneteenth is among the most important historically. However, he obtained federal recognition only four years ago and she remains vulnerable. Transatlantic slave trade has transformed the global economy, but the figures show that it was Juneteenth who has raised America at the top. Which tells you that the president’s concern about his elimination has much to do with our greatness and all that is linked to the vision of the world of an elected official who was approved by the Ku Klux Klan newspaper.

If it comes to the point where we – like France and Denmark – finish seriously by reducing a vacation, my vote is for Thanksgiving. The retail industry treats it as a slowdown between Halloween and Christmas, and when history tells its origins, it is not a vacation that are worth protesting to keep.

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