America would be “dying” just as fast if it weren’t for immigration.
Here is the problem that you continually ignore…the industrial world is aging. As nations get wealthier and better educated, birth rates decline to below the replacement level. No nation or culture has found a way to reverse that. Not Japan, not China, not Russia, not the UK, not the EU, not South Korea, not Taiwan, etc. It doesn’t matter if a nation is capitalist or socialist or if the trade strategy is globalization or mercantilism. Aging demographics is driving the bus.
The only way to mitigate a rapidly aging population that works is to bring young people in from the outside. That’s called immigration. The vast majority who want to immigrate are poor people from poor countries.
That’s the issue. The main reason we have a budget deficit is the same reason there is a global budget deficit. The proportion of elderly who need assistance is growing far faster than the proportion of workers who produce the wealth to pay for that assistance. That trend is going to continue for the foreseeable future.
The aging developed nations have three main options: 1) continually reduce benefits to the elderly as their numbers grow; 2) increase taxes on workers as their numbers diminish; 3) bring in more immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, Central America, South America, and India where birth rates are still relatively high.
If you can’t address this fundamental issue, nothing you are posting is relevant.
Or replace them with machines or robots. Yesterday I visited a bank for the first time in years. There were no tellers! You did your business with ATM machines. They also had a group of customer service people. You told a machine what your business was about and asked for your Fiscal ID number. It gave you a ticket with a number and you were eventually directed to the right booth.
Customer service people in Porto, both public and private, tend to be really nice and helpful. Many are multilingual, Spanish and English are quite common. Some speak Portuñol, a mix of português and español (they don’t capitalize the language names).
Elon Musk is talking about billions of humanoid robots. everyone will have one.
Perhaps. But it is interesting that in order to preserve one’s culture one would advocate replacing a human-based society with a robotic one. Seems counter-productive to me. Is robotics really better than human globalization?
BTW, recently returned from Porto/Lisbon. Nice places. Enjoyed eating barnacles. Had some qualms about octopus though. Tough to eat something that is more intelligent than the majority of American voters in the last election.
Europe needs immigration to drive its economy. But they want immigrants who accept their culture, language, etc rather than bring their own.
The “Netherlands is full” movement seems not to see the need.
This may also be a factor in the US too. Populist politics stress anti-immigration. White supremacy fits. Change maybe means gradual acceptance. But it takes time to sink in. Meanwhile some may prefer automation and robots.
The net cost to The Netherlands is negative for many immigrants. From the University of Amsterdam School of Economics:
Borderless Welfare State: The Consequences of Immigration for Public Finances
van de Beek et al.
From Table 0.2, Average net contribution of immigrants to public finances, by immigration motive and region, including the cost for the second generation
Labor immigration from Japan,
North America & Oceania 625K euro
Asylum immigration from Africa - 625K
Study immigration from EU 75K
Study immigration from Africa - 250K
“If immigration remains at the 2015-2019 level in terms of size and cost-benefit structure, the annual budget burden will gradually increase from 17 billion euros in 2016 to about 50 billion euros per year in the long run, a threefold increase that the welfare state most likely wouldn’t survive.”
He said “quite large increases in immigration” were piling more pressure on Britain’s housing stock, after net migration hit a record-breaking 745,000 in 2022…
“To some extent, the rents are really a reflection of supply and demand factors [and] reflect things that aren’t to do with monetary policy.”
It has been proposed on this board, before, that the nativist wave in the US is motivated by an attitude that the “others” are taking jobs, and taking housing, from USians. Run all the “others” out of the country, and both job and housing opportunities open up for USians, goes the reasoning.
Only true for the value the company added to the product as determined by the selling price of the product. But we have already established that the selling price is determined by the competition and in most cases only partially (if at all) compensates for any increase in tax costs.
For example, to fully escape any burden from a corporate tax increase a company may need to sell a formerly $100 product for a $110. But this will likely reduce demand and may also result in a loss of marketshare to companies willing to sell below $110 and pay at least part of the tax themselves. The optimum strategy may vary but at least one study indicates that consumers on average only take on about a third of the tax burden.
If a country doesn’t have enough housing for its current number of workers and the current number of workers is insufficient to get the economy to where it should be to build enough housing, then the problem isn’t immigration. The problem is with economic policy.
Housebuilding rates in England and Wales have dropped by more than a third after the introduction of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, from 2 per cent growth per year between 1856 and 1939 to 1.2 per cent between 1947 and 2019.
Central Europe is becoming the global financial center.
Don’t let bubblevision hear you say that! They think the US should be the center of the financial universe, for ever and ever. And they will support any amount of deregulation, and tolerate any amount of corruption. to keep the US the center of the universe.
I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind. I’m just making the argument that changes in corporate tax rates typically impact corporate profits and therefore shareholder value. That’s why corporations keep lobbying for lower tax rates.
The largely unspoken trade-off involved in membership of the European Union is that democracy and national sovereignty are sacrificed in return for economic prosperity. Member states give up much of their control over critical policy areas to an unelected, technocratic elite who are entrusted with delivering higher living standards and productivity. But Brussels is not keeping its part of the bargain – and hasn’t for some time…
Draghi’s bleak assessment actually underestimates the scale of the EU’s economic malaise. Looking at averages across the 27-member bloc obscures the depths of the crisis. Astonishingly, the economies of Italy, Spain and Greece, having been battered by the Euro crisis and EU-mandated austerity, are actually smaller than they were in the late 2000s…
So, what is to be done? According to Draghi, nothing less than a fundamental rethink in how Brussels approaches investment, trade policy and business regulation will dig Europe out of its hole…If, as Draghi believes, the choice facing Europe is radical change or ‘slow agony’, then slow agony is what Europe will get.
