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Michael A. Arouet: Believe it or not...
Michael A. Arouet
11, September #WirtschaftWackelt

Michael A. Arouet: Believe it or not...

Believe it or not, but France charges a child €58k to inherit a €400k family home from his mother. Italy, Spain, Germany, the UK, Poland, Portugal: €0. United States: $0. One country treats a modest family home like a taxable windfall. The others treat it as what it is: a parent passing on what they already paid tax on all their life to a child. You can't call it solidarity, you can't call it fairness. It is stealing from the dead. Prove me wrong.
Michael A. Arouet: Believe it or not...
https://x.com/MichaelAArouet/status/2098316231468060833
#WirtschaftWackelt
Michael A. Arouet: Italy, Spain, Germany...
Michael A. Arouet
19, September #WirtschaftWackelt, #GrenzPolitik

Michael A. Arouet: Italy, Spain, Germany...

Italy, Spain, Germany and some other European countries built some of the world’s most solid pension systems. They are now running out of children. Fertility sits around 1.1–1.4. Italy and Spain are among the oldest large nations on earth. The ratio of workers to retirees is collapsing. Pensions and healthcare are pay-as-you-go systems designed for a pyramid, not an inverted one. Mass immigration is sold as the easy patch, but is it? Young arrivals can delay the crunch for a few years if they work and pay in. Large inflows into welfare, informal work or low-productivity jobs do the opposite: they raise immediate fiscal costs, strain housing, healthcare and schools, and add future claimants who will also grow old. Low-skill migration does not restore the contributor-to-beneficiary ratio these systems urgently need. It often worsens the net fiscal picture over a lifetime while leaving the native birth collapse untouched. What makes it even worse, competition for entry level jobs in countries with high youth unemployment like Spain makes it even harder for young people to find a job and start a family. You cannot import a working-age population forever without caring about background and integration. That creates two-tier societies that erode the solidarity the welfare state depends on. The honest conversation is harder: why families of two or three children became economically and culturally rare, and why housing, work and time no longer line up with having kids? Mass immigration of the current mix is a delay tactic. Is it the right solution though?
#WirtschaftWackelt, #GrenzPolitik