[inglor_cz]

It is hard to deny that the EU has had a long period of stagnation and its economic power relative to other parts of the world has been rapidly shrinking.

It is hard to deny that we have a serious brain drain and a serious investition drain, too. European money regularly looks for investments in the US, to the tune of billions. The other way round? Not so much.

But people really don't want to admit that our welfare/bureaucratic systems can't be sustained with aging populations and stagnant economies.

[t43562]

When you start mentioning aging populations you trip over a fact that is nothing to do with our model. Short of tossing our aging population out onto the street we cannot do much more than increase immigration - something those old people don't like.

So this could be a debate about something completely other than the social model and it's so complicated that it's hard to have any sensible argument about it.

[inglor_cz]

Pay-as-you-go pension system is even worse equipped to deal with the aging situation than others.

The European social democratic model introduced after war relied a lot on having a lot of working age people supporting relatively small cohorts of the elderly. It was a working assumption - before birth control, few could imagine how deeply would fertility collapse.

The German chancellor Adenauer assured the Bundestag that "Leute haben Kinder immer" = people will always have children.

No, not always, no.