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I am sorry; what I wrote was not correct. What I meant was: The influx of refugees will strech the public finances. How much and whether "welcoming refugees e
by chvid 11y ago
I am sorry; what I wrote was not correct.
What I meant was: The influx of refugees will strech the public finances.
How much and whether "welcoming refugees eventually will turn out to be a good investment" is deeply controversial and so politicized that it is very hard to have a reasonable conversation about it.
However I think it is fair to say that taking in refugees costs money in the short term.
- morsch 11y agoMerkel buying new shoe laces costs money in the short term. You have just repeated your claims from the original post without clearing up what you mean by stretching public finances and documenting it with numbers. Everybody else is basically saying that the refugees aren't expensive enough to warrant this language on the balance sheet of one of the richer economies in the world.
- chvid 11y agoI really was biting my tongue to write this as dry and neutral as possible. I am from Denmark and in many ways we are similar to Germany. But we are different in that we have taken in a relatively small number of refugees (around 25.000 pa. excl. family reunions, population 6 mio.) and yet the subject number 1 in Danish politics is how to handle the strech on public finances it creates. This may be due to two things: 1. Denmark is more generous to refugees and/or integrates them more poorly. 2. Denmark has different politics where it is okay to talk refugees as expenses. (Whether they are or not is another question - my point is that our politicians talk about it in this way.) What I wrote would absolutely not be controversial to say in Denmark but I can see from the downvotes that it is different elsewhere. Which I think underlines my point that this subject really is too touchy to have a good conversation about.
- creshal 11y ago> But we are different in that we have taken in a relatively small number of refugees (around 25.000 pa. excl. family reunions, population 6 mio.) and yet the subject number 1 in Danish politics is how to handle the strech on public finances it creates. How much of that stretch is real, and how much is fear-mongering to influence upcoming elections? Do you have hard numbers?
- morsch 11y agoIt's completely reasonable to talk about refugees in terms of what they cost -- the number is important since it has to be accounted for in the budget planning after all. When you've got a reasonable feel for how high that number is, it's worth putting it into the context of the general budget to determine whether it "stretches it" (again, whatever that means). I don't have either of those numbers for Denmark. What to do with either of them is a separate question, if the estimated cost (or its relation to the general budget) is so high that it warrants barring the entry to asylum seekers. This is obviously a difficult thing to judge, since it trades off economic policy against what is typically framed in terms of basic human rights. Thanks for staying cool. :) I do think it's possible to have a reasonable conversation about this, and you are right that it is often strange how different the conversation is even just across the border.