Something Else for Paul Ryan to Think About

This is not "news", either. But it's serious.

Bankers are not the cause of the global economic crisis, according to the president of the Institute for the Works of Religion. Rather, the cause is ordinary people who do not "believe in the future" and have few or no children.

[Well, quite a few bankers are ZPG practitioners, anyway....]

"The true cause of the crisis is the decline in the birth rate,” Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, said in an interview on Vatican Television's "Octava Dies."

He noted the Western world's population growth rate is at 0% -- that is, two children per couple -- and this, he said, has led to a profound change in the structure of society.

"Instead of stimulating families and society to again believe in the future and have children […] we have stopped having children and have created a situation, a negative economic context decrease," Gotti Tedeschi observed. "And decrease means greater austerity."

“With the decline in births,” he explained, “there are fewer young people that productively enter the working world. And there are many more elderly people that leave the system of production and become a cost for the collective.

The article goes on to mention that "taxes cannot be reduced" in that environment.

This goes to the discussion over "immigration." For practical purposes, the Social Security crisis has been forestalled by SS taxes paid by immigrants, whether legal or not.

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

HT: Leonardi