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Posted on 03/27/2006 4:41:36 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
EU states are trying to understand why the birth rate is falling - and if anything can be done to stem the decline. All this week, the BBC News website is asking women in various countries how they feel about being asked to have more babies, and how easy or difficult it is to combine motherhood and work.
Here, the BBC News website's Clare Murphy asks why governments are so concerned about the size of their populations.
William The Conqueror was counting people nearly 1,000 years ago, and his European descendants are still at it. Small, today's politicians contend, isn't beautiful. Europe's working-age population is shrinking as fertility rates decline. In a fit of gloom, one German minister recently warned of the country "turning the light out" if its birth rate did not pick up.
Efforts to encourage couples to breed have a chequered history and, for many, recall fascist pasts. Mussolini heavily taxed single men in his Battle for Births, Hitler awarded medals to women with large families in his quest for a superior German race.
No-one is yet berating bachelors or mooting medallions for multiple births. But Europe's many governments are scrambling to find a solution.
Who cares?
Demographic decline causes anxiety because it is thought to go hand-in-hand with economic decline.
With fewer, younger workers to pay the health and pension bills of an elderly population, states face an unprecedented fiscal burden.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
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No EU country has the 2.1 birthrate needed to keep a population stable
The solution is self-evident: abolish the welfare state, root and branch. Extended family used to be the main [and frequently the only] "safety net".
Islamofascists will take over Europe before that would ever happen.
They don't need a "birth rate"... they're being overrun by moooslimbs breeding like rabbits.
That's the problem. Soon enough, it won't be safe for us to visit Leisure World aka Europe.
This just may have something to do with the fact that the Europeans are also staying away from Church in droves.
Women's lib took women to work in the 70's. The economy expanded for those jobs. Now women have to work alongside their men just to keep their households going. Now couples want fewer kids because they need the two incomes to survive and daycare would cost an arm and a leg literally to have 4 or 5 kids in it.
10 weeks off and 47 holidays... when the f*** do they work?
Government fertility drives go back considerably further than Mussolini - the Emperor Augustus had one. It didn't work then either.
I'm not quite as gloom-and-doom on this as some authors better than me. I do think that technology can shift the distribution of economic resources enough to take up most of the slack, as long as the economically productive element becomes even more so and faces fewer impediments. If they don't they'll need to be increasingly taxed, and when that happens economic productivity falls. The difficulty in the social democracies (read: Welfare States) is that such impediments are not being lifted and where that is tried - France and Germany - such reforms are being resisted.
If there is a practical solution it will consist of (1) an increasing fertility rate (those things are to a degree cyclical anyway), (2) economic reform that favors entrepreneurialism and lowers unemployment of potentially productive demographics, (3) tax reform that frees capital for economic activity, and (4) a tightened immigration control that admits the economically productive and keeps out those likely to drag, or tear, the system down. I think all of these are feasible even within the current European political culture, but none of them will be easy.
Not likely to happen. There were massive riots in France just because of a proposed new law making it easier for companies to fire recently hired workers under the age of 26.
BTTT
If you're a middle class person and you want to give your children a decent life, it's not easy to do that when the state is taking 70% of your income in taxes and the cost of housing (particularly in the UK) is even higher than it is in the most expensive markets in the USA.
The truth is they are still feeling the effects of losing 120 million men due to the Russian revolution, world war 1 and world war 2
None of us should be happy about "moooslem" birthrates. If they fall we are all thats left of Western Civ.
I don't see the problem with a lower birth rate as long as Musslimms are kept out. Abortion -- that's a crime, but if a family wants only 1 child, so be it.
Secularism. No society can survive without religion.
(french teenager)
"How dare you bring that up!!! Now you've done it, I'm going to go protest somewhere!!!"
Bingo! (along with abortion)
And it's hardly exclusive to Europe
Zut alors!
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