Emigration Up, Birth Rate Down
Graying Germany Contemplates Demographic Time Bomb
No, there is nothing in the Koran that obliges the fast breeding soldiers of Allah to pay the pensions of aging EUro-dhimmies…..
Germany is already facing a demographic nightmare as birth rates fall despite a slew of family-friendly policies. Now, new statistics show that more people are leaving the country than immigrating — adding to concerns about the country’s shrinking population. more from SPIEGEL…
We’re too broke to be this stupid
STEYN:
Beleaguered taxpayers may finally put a stop to the sheer waste of government spending
Back in 2008, when I was fulminating against multiculturalism on a more or less weekly basis, a reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.”
Two years later, we’re a lot less rich. In fact, many Western nations are, in any objective sense, insolvent. Hence last week’s column, on the EU’s decision to toss a trillion dollars into the great sucking maw of Greece’s public-sector kleptocracy. It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable. Â Mark Steyn has more>>
“Is Europe Turning Japanese?”
You Should Be So Lucky  [Mark Steyn]
I found this an arresting headline – “Is Europe Turning Japanese?” – but a goofy opening paragraph:
The dismal growth prospects of many European countries has raised an increasing number of questions about whether large parts of the continent will emulate Japan of the 1990s and endure a decade-long economic stagnation. On the face of it, a long-lasting Japan-style post-bubble slump with deflation seems a plausible outcome for a large part of the continent.
For a start, Europe’s would be a no-bubble slump – and, as for “decade-long economic stagnation”, you should be so lucky. Japan isn’t in a “slump”, it’s in long-term decline. In my book, I recalled the days of hysteria about how “the yellow peril was annexing America and pretty soon they’d be speaking Japanese down at the shopping mall”:
It didn’t happen and it’s never going to happen. In the Nineties, I tended to accept the experts’ line that Japan’s rising sun had gone into eclipse because its economywas riddled with protectionism, cronyism and inefficient special-interest groups. But so what? You could have said the same in the Sixties and Seventies, when the joint was jumping. The only real structural difference between Japan then and Japan now is that the yellow peril got a lot wrinklier. What happened in the 1990s was what Yamada Masahiro of Tokyo’s Gakugei University calls the first “low birth-rate recession”. It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the stupidity, economists – the stupidity of thinking you can ignore demography.
