[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.