dksone: And without all those bad immigrants, who'll pay your nice retirement when you're 65?
Avogadro6: Not sure how it is on Belgium, but that's not how things work around here. If anything, the opposite is far more likely, especially where I live.
It works in Belgium the same way as about everywhere with state run retirement: the people currently working pays for the people who retired through taxes. But there need to be a sufficient population grow for it to work, and since couples don't have enough child, it must be compensate through immigration.
You see, the measures our current "emergency" government had to employ to reduce the debt and appease Europe's concerns are slowly strangling an already weakened economy. Taxes are raising, prices increasing, purchasing power keeps dropping, thousands of small companies are barely able to keep going and hundreds are closing, pensioners have been screwed. In short, poverty and unemployement are growing.
Monti keeps being confronted on that regard, and he keeps saying the situation left no alternatives. As true as it might be, the austerity line so strongly supported by Germany and France is absolutely unsustainable on the long run, and he knows it. We risk heading into a deep recession, and unless we get the green light and the founds to invest into growth, we will.
All of this is to say that you shouldn't be surprised to read there's some hostility toward Europe, or at least its politics. It's always been kind of a double edged sword for us. Back in '99, the adoption of Euro "saved" us from a weak currency and extreme inflation, but as immediate results prices almost doubled.
I honestly think we need Europe, and Europe needs us, for resons that go well beyond our debt. But the big picture means nothing when you have a family to feed and you can barely afford to pay for the bare necessities.
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I agree with that, the current measure are bad, and won't help for long. The economy won't reboot without tax
cuts. My point rather was that if Italy needs a bailout, the only ones who would pay for it will be the EU.
Sure, EU did some really dumb things, it did some good ones too, and in the current situation, it will be needed, so now is kind of too late to be against EU.
Now we can only hope Hollande's election will weaken Merkel's position enough to allow a change of politics Europe-wide.
What I fear about Hollande is that he made is campaign around increasing spending in a dumb way, with no adequate way to increase revenue accordingly (taxing the rich just isn't the thing), which will drag the French economy down, and that's not what we will need while bailing out other countries.
And I doubt Hollande will help much to reach a common position between the EU countries, while it would be the best of times to start acting like an union, and help each other out.
In Belgium, there always was one half of the country which was economically strong, and paid for the other half which would invest in future industries, then paid back to the other while it crashed. It's not perfect, but in my opinion, that, in a EU scale, would be better than the current situation where countries are left to suffocate until they default and need bailout anyway.
