Agreed. What I want to know is whether or not Germans themselves see any connection between their entitlements and their static economy (0.1% GDP growth so far in 2011).
Economies are driven by birthrate. Remember the “baby boom”ers that were born from 1946 to 1964? A 2.1 fertility rate means a static economy since that is minimum replacement level for a country.
It seems that as pretty much any country that becomes wealthy and has an increase in the standard of living the children become less of a priority. Entitlements only exacerbate that problem.