What makes you think France is destroying its economy ? And what makes you think UK or Germany is that much better ? When you scratch behind the superficial discourses around european economy, some underlying issues are systemic and shared across all big European economies. One of them is the very weak capitalization of banks, and high asset/gdp of the private banking system [1]. This by itself explains a large part of the current European policies (for example, those countries don't/can't recognize that they will need to re-capitalize their banks at taxpayer-expense).

This is much, much more critical than changes in taxes which effects are at best very disputed, and mostly explained by political biases of each side.

[1] (asset / gdp is > 6x GDP for switzerland, > 3x GDP for UK and France, to compare to 0.6 x GDP for the US: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303...)