Tag Archives: Europe

News

Massive changes needed to avert demographic catastrophe in European Union

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Story from LifeSiteNews.

Excerpt:

According to the report by Norway’s Institute for Family Policies abortion rates in Britain have leaped by a third among unmarried teenage girls and abortion is helping to age the population of Europe. Without a massive shift to family-friendly policies, the pattern of increased abortion and increasingly aging population will inevitably lead to the collapse of social welfare benefits, and, ultimately, to the bankruptcy of Europe’s cradle-to-grave socialist welfare state.

Presented to the European Parliament on Wednesday, the report said that the situation of the family in Europe is “a desolate panorama.”

“Europe is plunged in an unprecedented demographic winter and has become an elderly continent, with a large birth deficit, fewer marriages and more of them broken, homes emptying.”

“The aging population, critical birth-rate, escalating abortions, the collapse of marriage, the explosion in family breakups and the emptying of homes are the main problems of Europeans,” the 2009 Report on the Evolution of the Family in Europe said.

[…]The dropping European birth rate, the report says, with its concomitant increasing health and pension costs, will lead to increases in public expenditure to care for the aging population and the eventual collapse of public revenues, leading finally to the bankruptcy of the welfare state. The average birth rate of EU countries is now 1.38 per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman, even in relatively fertile countries like France.

Without a significant shift in family policies in all EU countries, the report predicts the result will be “catastrophic.” Starting in 2010, the population of Europe overall will begin to fall from 499 million to 472 million by 2050 and every third inhabitant will be over 65.

[…]Other indicators show the number of marriages, especially first marriages, is down and divorce rates are up. There are 1 in 4 fewer marriages than in 1980 and the marriage rate has fallen in 9 out 10 countries. One out of every 3 children (36.5 per cent) is born outside marriage. In some countries the fall in marriage rate has been around 50 per cent since 1983 and there are over one million divorces a year, the equivalent to one marital breakdown every 30 seconds.

You can take a look at the actual numbers here. It’s a mess. This should convince fiscal conservatives to support social conservatism. Abortion and the destruction of two-parent families imposes massive social costs on society, and it grows government to deal with the fallout. Government pay for all the social programs, welfare, police, jails, etc. But it also has to regulate broken families via the courts. It makes no sense to abandon morality and expect government to stay the same – it will have to grow.

Maybe we shouldn’t have let the secular socialist elites run things? Could it be that believers in traditional morality and small government were in the right? Could it be that there is a price to pay for believing in materialism and naturalism, and jettisoning morality for hedonism?

Videos

What are the effects of Nancy Pelosi’s proposed national sales tax?

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Watch this video by libertarian Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute. (H/T Power Line via ECM)

I normally don’t like these Dan Mitchell videos, but this one is better than the others I’ve seen at giving you a great introduction to so many useful topics.

The national sales tax would be a GREAT idea, if we went on to remove an equivalent amount of revenue from the income tax. It’s much better to tax consumption than productive work. But that’s not what the Democrats want to do with this value-added tax. They want both income and consumption taxes, so they get a new revenue stream and more money to buy votes from their favorite special interest groups.

Here is a Wall Street Journal article about the Democrats’ proposed VAT.

Excerpt:

The allure of a VAT for politicians is that it applies to every level of production or service, rakes in piles of money, and is largely hidden from those who ultimately pay it—namely, consumers. With a $9 trillion 10-year budget deficit, $4 trillion in spending in fiscal 2010 alone, and a $1 trillion (at a minimum) health-care entitlement in the wings, Mrs. Pelosi knows that not even the revenue from the expiration of the lower Bush tax rates in 2011 will cover the bills. Nearly every European country that has passed national health care has also eventually imposed a VAT, and it’s foolish to think the U.S. will be different.

Tax and spend.

Commentary

Guest post: Photograph of early Christian engraving found in Rome

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WK: This is a guest post by journalist and blogger Rick Heller, who blogs at TransparentEye.This post is cross-posted here.

I was in Rome a few weeks ago, and took this photo in the entryway of the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, one of the oldest churches in Rome. The engraving is one of a number preserved from an early date, and uses the Chi Rho symbol, which employs the first two Greek letters in “Christ.”

Maximinus in Chi Rho

I’ve been reflecting on the conversion of the Greco-Roman world to Christianity, and contrasting it with the persistence of polytheism in the Hindu world (as an agnostic, I have no stake in any of these religions).

Christianity was legalized in the Roman Empire by Constantine in 313, starting a period of toleration that ended when Theodosius prohibited paganism later in the century. Paganism seems to have quickly disappeared. The pagans were apparently unwilling to die for their religion in the way that Christians were for theirs. I’m not an expert in this, but it seems to me that Greco-Roman religion, with its view of Hades, didn’t offer much in the way of an incentive for dying for one’s faith.

Hinduism, by contrast, has survived and prospered, despite the Muslim conquest of India many centuries ago (Indian Buddhism was essentially destroyed). I don’t know how to account for this, but it has been suggested to me that the Hindu belief in reincarnation gave it a strength and resilience that Greco-Roman religion lacked.

I do find engravings like the above moving. It appears to me to have been carved by a non-professional hand–certainly with less regularity than on an official Roman inscription–and thus seems like a personal communication transmitted across the centuries.