Agreed about combination and indeed look it up, I am aware only about figures from Czech Rep budget, which I posted somewhere on this board not long ago*. If we included corporate welfare and tax concessions to the rich :) well, not sure how to determine this because once a figure would be estimated it can be immediately doubted by arguments about rich taking their business elsewhere for example. Look at Ireland and Apple.

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edit:* and this is not counting in cost of health care which is like black hole .. can pour any amount of money into it, literally.

Bernoulli wrote:

Ven. Kwan Tam Woo wrote:

Bernoulli wrote:Increase retirement age? It's already high, not least for everyone who doesn't work in an office chair.

The natural and historical order of things is that people depart from this Earth when they become too old to making productive contributions to society. Any society which thinks that everyone can and should have 20, 30, or 40 year-long paid holidays is frankly spoilt and delusional; if life expectancies are increasing, and technological developments are reducing the need for physically demanding labour, then why shouldn’t productive lifespans increase with them??

An increase in average life span doesn't equate to an increase in the ability to do something when you are 60. Sure, around the edges, medical advances can help people of a certain age be more productive and healthy than someone the same age from a couple of generations ago. But the main reason that average life span is increasing is that medicine has reduced and pushed back the catastrophic end of life diseases. So instead of say 50% of people being dead by 70 from cancer and heart disease, they don't get those diseases and kick the bucket until they are 80. Besides small advances, a modern healthy 70 year old is still as decrepit as a healthy one was a couple of generations ago.

Then developed countries must ask themselves: why are they investing so much effort and resources into what essentially amounts to mass-scale life support? It almost sounds like the medical industry is covertly parasitizing taxpayers by maximising the number of needy living ghosts in their midst.

People on unemployment benefits are already living miserable lives. There's almost nothing that can be humanely taken away from them.

Whether or not nothing can be "humanely" taken away from such people is beside the point, and the answer varies considerably from country to country in any case. The point is that there should be very limited or zero access to welfare systems for anyone who isn't a legal long-term resident of the country that they're trying to claim welfare from.

And to what extent can immigrants really be said to contribute to a functioning state of society when they are attracted by its lavish welfare system,

What a crock of shit. If immigration is largely restricted to skills shortages and family reunion, then the welfare load is low.

“If” being the operative word.

It's not operative in Australia.

I'm talking about all of the developed world, not just Australia.

are low-skilled and/or not proficient in the local language, increase its crime rates, and introduce terrorism and sociopolitical instability which scares off business investment and tourism?

Feel the fear, bro.

If I feel the fear, it’s because I see the reality.

If you've got a conservative brain (like most people who are against immigration), then fear is driving you irrationally to some of these beliefs.

I don't have a "conservative brain", whatever the hell that's supposed to be. Evidence plus a sense of personal and collective self-preservation is driving me very much rationally towards such beliefs.

In which case they are no longer "curbing and reducing" their population or its aggregate ecological footprint.

Exactly my point. Hence why curbing or reducing immigration as proposed by you for ecological benefit is a silly idea.

You did read the title of this thread, right? Population growth is a function of births, deaths and migration. As I pointed out, the ‘birth’ part of that function is already being addressed in high ecological footprint countries (especially developed countries). This leaves us with deaths and migration. Now since any measures to increase death rates are almost certainly going to involve serious violations of human rights, the only lever we have left at our disposal – notwithstanding some miraculous technological breakthrough which allows us to obtain all our energy/material needs from unicorn farts – is migration. So if the population ought to be further “curbed and reduced” – which, again, is the very premise of this thread which was *not* started by me – then I would much prefer a couple of decades of economic stagnation and societal readjustment as a result of low fertility rates than killing people en masse or ignoring the problem until it becomes too urgent and unpleasant to ignore.

Did you read my posts in this thread? The title is based on a false premise - that is, that it is population itself that drives our problems. Population isn't the problem. It's the level of consumption by the rich West that is the problem.

No I can't honestly say that I read your posts, except the ones where you quoted me. I agree that the title is based on two false premises, namely the one you describe as well as the premise that the global human population isn't already being curbed and reduced. What I am saying is that the aggregate level of consumption in developed countries is actually being countered by their low fertility rates, but this countering effect is itself being cancelled out by the fact that large numbers of low-consumption people from developing countries are becoming high-consumption people as a result of migrating to (or being the children of people who migrated from developing countries to) developed countries.