6 ms·

Tax hikes (1st, 3rd), Care for the elderly and Refugees are all related. I recently moved to Italy. I was extremely surprised with the contradiction of thought

Tax hikes (1st, 3rd), Care for the elderly and Refugees are all related. I recently moved to Italy. I was extremely surprised with the contradiction of thought of the average (+50y/o) Italian. Newborns in Europe are in a decline (specially in rich countries like Germany) while life expectancy is on the rise (old people live longer). How are you supposed to fund that? There are less young people working and creating value for the society and you have more old people to feed, cure and maintain. In this scheme, the only "solution" that the state has is to raise taxes. Refugees (and african/muslim) migration seem to be a good "solution" to this. There are a lot of africans coming for work, generally very hardworking people. They will create value, consume and pay taxes and eventually complement the lowest-layers of the demographic pyramid (young active people). Yet, the average Italian (specially +50) is extremely racist. They want them out of their country. I've met some africans and they're all great people. YES, they are different (culturally) and they have a hard time learning the language, but that doesn't mean they can't integrate into society. Anyways, I'm surprised by the contradiction. They want to pay lower taxes (who doesn't, right?), but they don't want to accept younger people to work. baffled --- EDIT: I'm speaking about MY experience in Italy. I've heard Germany is a lot friendlier with immigrants and it's one of the least racists countries. STILL, the "refugees" fear is N4 in that survey.

disneygibson 5y ago
Is this really so hard to understand? Italy is a country whose identity is entirely built on its cultural history. It is not surprising at all that older people dislike the idea of foreigners coming in that have little relation to them, don’t speak their language, and aren’t really interested in maintaining heavily Catholic, traditional Italian society. The same exact thing happens in Korea, Japan, China, Eastern Europe, Norway, and pretty much any other country that isn’t explicitly built on the idea of immigration and assimilation.
- atlasunshrugged 5y ago
  It's hard to understand if you believe that not embracing it will basically destroy the economic fundamentals of the country and the social benefits which so many people depend on. What's better, accepting some immigrants (many of whom will assimilate; maybe not totally but somewhat) or having the state become insolvent and not provide pensions?
  - disneygibson 5y ago
    I think Italians would rather be poor but maintain their cultural history and identity. It isn’t an anglophone country built on immigration and no economics argument is very convincing to them.
    - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
      Yes, I guess many Americans would say they feel the same (which is interesting given we are a country built on immigration and without such a rich history and identity) which is why I'm skeptical that's the actual reason but sure, it's an argument.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
trabant00 5y ago
This is an old and tired straw man argument. Yes, there are simple minded people out there who oppose immigration on principle and racism. But a lot of people are in fact opposed to indiscriminate immigration. A significant proportion of refugees are criminals, plain and simple. They often have the means to move that simple, poor, hard working people don't. Taking large waves of refugees with no filtering will gurantee that the honest working ones will suffer by association with the bad ones. Edit: Huge numbers of desperate refugees will also accept pay and working conditions that put local workers out of options. Immigration is not a good thing just like it's not a bad thing. The devil is always is the details.
- krageon 5y ago
  > A significant proportion of refugees are criminals Probably good to actually give any sort of evidence for your frankly outrageous claim, otherwise it just looks like you too are incredibly racist.
  - santiagobasulto 5y ago
    I was about to comment the same thing. An incredibly bold statement with 0 evidence to back it up.
  - s9w 5y ago
    Almost _all_ crime is commited by foreign ethnicities.
  - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
    If you think that the vast majority of these people are 'economic' refugees which is generally not of legal status then technically all of them are criminals because they have broken the law to get there. This is the only way this argument makes any sense to me and that's with a big helping of benefit of the doubt.
    - krageon 5y ago
      That assumption is also one that would need proof, as that is also fairly outrageous. That said, it would be a very charitable way to read the original post.
bojangleslover 5y ago
Do they want to pay lower taxes? Or do they not want to pay higher taxes? I think every percentage point over about 40% starts to really niggle people—more in magnitude than getting a 1% break would please them. In other words, fear of going from 40-45% is greater than hope for going from 40-35%.
twa999 5y ago
> but they don't want to accept younger people to work if you're an EU citizen you can move to germany and work there. this creates high incentives for workers from poorer eastern european countries to work in germany but send a huge chunk back to their family. some industries would not exists without this model, most notorious asparagus harvesting or private nursing services. Germany accepted millions of migrants since 2015, but it's highly doubtful that this will be a net positive within the next century. Most of them are unskilled and only granted asylum which is temporary and by german law asylum seekers or migrants with temporary resident status are heavily restricted from taking up work. I guess the argument once was, why allow them to work if they will be deported anyway soon. But usually this is a long legal process leaving them in a limbo state for years. There are special programs however to train them to be nurses to obtain permanent residency. But it is unlikely that then german refugee policy from ~2015 will be a net benefit for social security etc.
- soco 5y ago
  The asparagus temp workers working in Germany pay taxes in Germany for that period. So even if they spend otherwise very little there and send money to families, they are still a net benefit to the German economy. Plus the asparagus gets harvested, of course.
  - tommek4077 5y ago
    They are on minimum wage, not paying much if anything at all.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      You pay VAT on your asparagus.
mmarq 5y ago
The contradiction you’ve identified is a phenomenon that’s pervasive in the West and I think it’s caused mainly by the ageing population. It is more evident in Italy because the population tends to be older, its employment rate lower and because of the prevalence, compared to other developed countries, of low added value jobs and economic activities. The latter 2 tend to produce a badly educated population (see the PIAAC or PISA results), which tends to have dumber ideas than a better educated one. You can see similar developments in the UK (triple lock, Brexit, NI increases, ecc…), even though not as pathological, probably because its economic system is healthier than the Italian. Italy would need millions of immigrants not much to pay pensions, but to reinvigorate the national debate and economy. Maybe if there were enough under-40s, pensions could be reduced and that money could be spent in more productive endeavours.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>How are you supposed to fund that? Extend the retirement age, raise taxes, offer less public services. Of course people won't vote for any of those so you are correct, there is a lot of cognitive dissonance going on.
jgb1984 5y ago
Ah yes, the myth of immigration as both cultural enrichment and economically beneficial. I can tell you that at least in my own (Belgium) and neighboring country (Netherlands) this hasn't been the case. The cost of immigration, especially from outside of the EU, is catastrophically high, and remains that way, even for 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants. A paper studied the cost of immigration in the Netherlands to be around 400 billion euros between 1995 and 2019 (I can only find the paper in Dutch from the Renaissance institute, performed by several PhD / processors). The people arriving here from outside of the EU are often unskilled, in certain cases illiterate, and come from a cultural and religious background which proves to be nearly impossible to integrate, let alone assimilate. As a result, in Brussels and many cities all around western Europe, it's riddled with ghettos, people living outside of the system, in poverty, with ideas that aren't compatible with our society (about topics such as religion, rule of law, sexuality, equality and so on). In my own neighborhood there are parts where as a woman you can't walk the street without a headscarf or you'll be harassed. And I'm not even suggesting what happens if you're openly gay in said streets. Even multiple generations down the line the situation doesn't improve. Why, in countries that are supposedly democratic, should mass immigration be the one thing that is shoved down our throats, without having any influence or say in it? Side note: Belgium has a very flexible and generous social security system. We are known for providing unemployment benefits without any limit in duration, and with too little stimulus and followup, resulting in a lot of people simply exploiting the system. This is why immigration and the access to said system is a sensitive topic. We are also famous for having bungled the topic of integration for decades, resulting in people having lived here for ages and still not even speak the local language.
- atlasunshrugged 5y ago
  I'm sorry to hear about your experience and as an American who lived in a few European cities I know what you mean, some neighborhoods are decidedly un-European, but I would partially blame that not on the immigrants but on policies that bring in so many at once. Of course there is no need to assimilate when there is a huge neighborhood of people just like you... imagine the driving culture if you brought a million Cairo cab drivers to Singapore? But if you bring 50 a year, they assimilate. That said, I'm pretty sure most economists (other than Borjas perhaps, whose seminal work on the Mariel boatlift seems critically flawed) would broadly disagree with you about the net economic benefits being negative and I would love if you could share that paper. https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of-free-movement-would-be-78-trillion-richer https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of... https://www.cgdev.org/blog/what-mariel-boatlift-cuban-refugees-can-teach-us-about-economics-immigration https://www.cgdev.org/blog/what-mariel-boatlift-cuban-refuge...
atlasunshrugged 5y ago
I've always thought that was fascinating as well. You see the same dynamic in the U.S. where a huge amount of the population growth is from immigration or recentish immigrant families... without them either taxes go up, services have to be cut, but people think they're stealing jobs or destroying American culture. Maybe people just believe it's worth destroying our social systems to maintain the "culture" of the country but feels more like a knee jerk racist reaction by many without really understanding the huge benefit immigrants (especially skilled ones) bring to countries.
s9w 5y ago
"Refugees" don't work.
f6v 5y ago
Perhaps you can grow economy by doing more automation. Naïve example is the lawn in front of my Danish apartment being taken care of by a robot. There’re countless other possibilities.
- santiagobasulto 5y ago
  But those robots won't pay taxes to support the elderly :) It's a tough topic for sure. I've heard that German people are a lot better with immigrants and racism is very low. The wikipedia article is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany
  - jcynix 5y ago
    > But those robots won't pay taxes to support the elderly :) That's a problem which could be resolved: companies do replace people by robots to reduce labor costs. But companies (owners, shareholders, etc) still want to profit from all kinds of common infrastructure. So force them (with law and regulations) to continue to share a part of the saved expenses, e.g. by continuing to pay social expenses for their robots. That way they'd still save money by automation, but would do this in some socially responsible ways.
    - robots_arise 5y ago
      Your suggestion is counterproductive. Companies that are forced to pay a robot tax are uncompetitive and will be forced out of the market. End result: no tax revenue. Companies that operate in an industry that can be or is likely to be automated will hire less or no people so as to not be liable for the robot tax should they at a later date start automating. End result: less employment, less tax revenue and stunted growth. A robot tax will result in more bullshit jobs. Jobs that can be done by automation should be done by machines. Human labor should be reserved for jobs that cannot be automated. Your suggestion is akin to a populist policy that treats symptoms rather than root causes, trading good optics and a short term gain for unintended consequences and long term pain.
- 5y ago

disneygibson 5y ago

Is this really so hard to understand? Italy is a country whose identity is entirely built on its cultural history. It is not surprising at all that older people dislike the idea of foreigners coming in that have little relation to them, don’t speak their language, and aren’t really interested in maintaining heavily Catholic, traditional Italian society. The same exact thing happens in Korea, Japan, China, Eastern Europe, Norway, and pretty much any other country that isn’t explicitly built on the idea of immigration and assimilation.

atlasunshrugged 5y ago
It's hard to understand if you believe that not embracing it will basically destroy the economic fundamentals of the country and the social benefits which so many people depend on. What's better, accepting some immigrants (many of whom will assimilate; maybe not totally but somewhat) or having the state become insolvent and not provide pensions?
- disneygibson 5y ago
  I think Italians would rather be poor but maintain their cultural history and identity. It isn’t an anglophone country built on immigration and no economics argument is very convincing to them.
  - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
    Yes, I guess many Americans would say they feel the same (which is interesting given we are a country built on immigration and without such a rich history and identity) which is why I'm skeptical that's the actual reason but sure, it's an argument.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

trabant00 5y ago

This is an old and tired straw man argument. Yes, there are simple minded people out there who oppose immigration on principle and racism. But a lot of people are in fact opposed to indiscriminate immigration. A significant proportion of refugees are criminals, plain and simple. They often have the means to move that simple, poor, hard working people don't. Taking large waves of refugees with no filtering will gurantee that the honest working ones will suffer by association with the bad ones. Edit: Huge numbers of desperate refugees will also accept pay and working conditions that put local workers out of options. Immigration is not a good thing just like it's not a bad thing. The devil is always is the details.

krageon 5y ago
> A significant proportion of refugees are criminals Probably good to actually give any sort of evidence for your frankly outrageous claim, otherwise it just looks like you too are incredibly racist.
- santiagobasulto 5y ago
  I was about to comment the same thing. An incredibly bold statement with 0 evidence to back it up.
- s9w 5y ago
  Almost _all_ crime is commited by foreign ethnicities.
- atlasunshrugged 5y ago
  If you think that the vast majority of these people are 'economic' refugees which is generally not of legal status then technically all of them are criminals because they have broken the law to get there. This is the only way this argument makes any sense to me and that's with a big helping of benefit of the doubt.
  - krageon 5y ago
    That assumption is also one that would need proof, as that is also fairly outrageous. That said, it would be a very charitable way to read the original post.

bojangleslover 5y ago

Do they want to pay lower taxes? Or do they not want to pay higher taxes? I think every percentage point over about 40% starts to really niggle people—more in magnitude than getting a 1% break would please them. In other words, fear of going from 40-45% is greater than hope for going from 40-35%.

twa999 5y ago

> but they don't want to accept younger people to work if you're an EU citizen you can move to germany and work there. this creates high incentives for workers from poorer eastern european countries to work in germany but send a huge chunk back to their family. some industries would not exists without this model, most notorious asparagus harvesting or private nursing services. Germany accepted millions of migrants since 2015, but it's highly doubtful that this will be a net positive within the next century. Most of them are unskilled and only granted asylum which is temporary and by german law asylum seekers or migrants with temporary resident status are heavily restricted from taking up work. I guess the argument once was, why allow them to work if they will be deported anyway soon. But usually this is a long legal process leaving them in a limbo state for years. There are special programs however to train them to be nurses to obtain permanent residency. But it is unlikely that then german refugee policy from ~2015 will be a net benefit for social security etc.

soco 5y ago
The asparagus temp workers working in Germany pay taxes in Germany for that period. So even if they spend otherwise very little there and send money to families, they are still a net benefit to the German economy. Plus the asparagus gets harvested, of course.
- tommek4077 5y ago
  They are on minimum wage, not paying much if anything at all.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    You pay VAT on your asparagus.

mmarq 5y ago

The contradiction you’ve identified is a phenomenon that’s pervasive in the West and I think it’s caused mainly by the ageing population. It is more evident in Italy because the population tends to be older, its employment rate lower and because of the prevalence, compared to other developed countries, of low added value jobs and economic activities. The latter 2 tend to produce a badly educated population (see the PIAAC or PISA results), which tends to have dumber ideas than a better educated one. You can see similar developments in the UK (triple lock, Brexit, NI increases, ecc…), even though not as pathological, probably because its economic system is healthier than the Italian. Italy would need millions of immigrants not much to pay pensions, but to reinvigorate the national debate and economy. Maybe if there were enough under-40s, pensions could be reduced and that money could be spent in more productive endeavours.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

>How are you supposed to fund that? Extend the retirement age, raise taxes, offer less public services. Of course people won't vote for any of those so you are correct, there is a lot of cognitive dissonance going on.

jgb1984 5y ago

Ah yes, the myth of immigration as both cultural enrichment and economically beneficial. I can tell you that at least in my own (Belgium) and neighboring country (Netherlands) this hasn't been the case. The cost of immigration, especially from outside of the EU, is catastrophically high, and remains that way, even for 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants. A paper studied the cost of immigration in the Netherlands to be around 400 billion euros between 1995 and 2019 (I can only find the paper in Dutch from the Renaissance institute, performed by several PhD / processors). The people arriving here from outside of the EU are often unskilled, in certain cases illiterate, and come from a cultural and religious background which proves to be nearly impossible to integrate, let alone assimilate. As a result, in Brussels and many cities all around western Europe, it's riddled with ghettos, people living outside of the system, in poverty, with ideas that aren't compatible with our society (about topics such as religion, rule of law, sexuality, equality and so on). In my own neighborhood there are parts where as a woman you can't walk the street without a headscarf or you'll be harassed. And I'm not even suggesting what happens if you're openly gay in said streets. Even multiple generations down the line the situation doesn't improve. Why, in countries that are supposedly democratic, should mass immigration be the one thing that is shoved down our throats, without having any influence or say in it? Side note: Belgium has a very flexible and generous social security system. We are known for providing unemployment benefits without any limit in duration, and with too little stimulus and followup, resulting in a lot of people simply exploiting the system. This is why immigration and the access to said system is a sensitive topic. We are also famous for having bungled the topic of integration for decades, resulting in people having lived here for ages and still not even speak the local language.

atlasunshrugged 5y ago
I'm sorry to hear about your experience and as an American who lived in a few European cities I know what you mean, some neighborhoods are decidedly un-European, but I would partially blame that not on the immigrants but on policies that bring in so many at once. Of course there is no need to assimilate when there is a huge neighborhood of people just like you... imagine the driving culture if you brought a million Cairo cab drivers to Singapore? But if you bring 50 a year, they assimilate. That said, I'm pretty sure most economists (other than Borjas perhaps, whose seminal work on the Mariel boatlift seems critically flawed) would broadly disagree with you about the net economic benefits being negative and I would love if you could share that paper. https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of-free-movement-would-be-78-trillion-richer https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of... https://www.cgdev.org/blog/what-mariel-boatlift-cuban-refugees-can-teach-us-about-economics-immigration https://www.cgdev.org/blog/what-mariel-boatlift-cuban-refuge...

atlasunshrugged 5y ago

I've always thought that was fascinating as well. You see the same dynamic in the U.S. where a huge amount of the population growth is from immigration or recentish immigrant families... without them either taxes go up, services have to be cut, but people think they're stealing jobs or destroying American culture. Maybe people just believe it's worth destroying our social systems to maintain the "culture" of the country but feels more like a knee jerk racist reaction by many without really understanding the huge benefit immigrants (especially skilled ones) bring to countries.

s9w 5y ago

"Refugees" don't work.

f6v 5y ago

Perhaps you can grow economy by doing more automation. Naïve example is the lawn in front of my Danish apartment being taken care of by a robot. There’re countless other possibilities.

santiagobasulto 5y ago
But those robots won't pay taxes to support the elderly :) It's a tough topic for sure. I've heard that German people are a lot better with immigrants and racism is very low. The wikipedia article is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany
- jcynix 5y ago
  > But those robots won't pay taxes to support the elderly :) That's a problem which could be resolved: companies do replace people by robots to reduce labor costs. But companies (owners, shareholders, etc) still want to profit from all kinds of common infrastructure. So force them (with law and regulations) to continue to share a part of the saved expenses, e.g. by continuing to pay social expenses for their robots. That way they'd still save money by automation, but would do this in some socially responsible ways.
  - robots_arise 5y ago
    Your suggestion is counterproductive. Companies that are forced to pay a robot tax are uncompetitive and will be forced out of the market. End result: no tax revenue. Companies that operate in an industry that can be or is likely to be automated will hire less or no people so as to not be liable for the robot tax should they at a later date start automating. End result: less employment, less tax revenue and stunted growth. A robot tax will result in more bullshit jobs. Jobs that can be done by automation should be done by machines. Human labor should be reserved for jobs that cannot be automated. Your suggestion is akin to a populist policy that treats symptoms rather than root causes, trading good optics and a short term gain for unintended consequences and long term pain.
5y ago