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Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

Just offset the lack of new people being born by opening up borders to everyone, problem solved!

It's helping Germany offset an ageing population and declining economic productivity. If age distribution in your population is becoming unbalanced and you can't encourage the current residents to increase the birth rate, what other option is there?

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/migration-drives-german...

I can't see where it help us declininng economic productivity. Other options: family friendly politic, better education, investments in schools, better care in schools (full day care), consistent politic where you can plan your future,....

Today we can read in the newspaper, that 25% of our children in school can not read. Elephant in the room.

If the people don't exist, they can't produce. You can make all the policy decisions you want, but the economy will stagnate if you don't have people working in fields or factories or wiring up houses. Sure, better education might make higher-value workers that produce more economic value. Providing better support for families will help people interested in having children potentially have more children and be economically productive while doing so. If your current citizens don't want to have children, then it doesn't matter.

What good is a population high when the new people aren't net contributors to the economy?

Ironically, immigrants are usually net contributors (not eligible for welfare, have to work) while children are not (until they reach the age of majority).

Big difference between immigrants as the US sees them and the way Germany sees them. The US doesn't have a social safety net to speak of for immigrants, Germany does for refugees. Nobody is complaining about the Indian IT workers or EE truck drivers when they say "immigrants."

The solution is not to rely on workers to finance your schemes. Most of our economic development is captured by the wealthy.

Do you need to sustain the elderly? Have 100% wealth tax at age 60 and use it to pay equal retirement for everybody above 60. Let elderly sustain elderly.

100% too much? Ok, let's say it's only for the money above 10 million. Or 50, or 100, whatever.

I sympathize with the idea in principle, but do you really think people who are that rich will not find ways to evade the tax? Most likely they can prevent such a tax being installed at all. Money = power.

You are right of course. What I'm opposed to is when poor people (by which I mean everybody except billionaires) claim that there are no other solutions instead of saying that there are plenty of other potential solutions but billionaires won't let us have them.

> what other option is there?

Cloning?

> can't encourage the current residents

Can't or won't?

What are companies doing: training people or just hiring externally and expecting those new hires to hit the ground running? The same strategy is applied everywhere.

I always thought this type of argument assumes that the immigrants will magically locate and fix societal problems that lead to the decline as they integrate, and that that would be an unreasonable expectation.

Could this be saying that future dystopian megalopolises should sustain own existences by capturing free-ranged humans roaming wastelands, promise them successes and citizenships, and then letting them die without offsprings?

That certainly is an approach worth considering; immigration has been described as America's cheat code.

This but unironically.

But ... they might be non-white! Or Irish! We can't have that.

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