Welfare should be abolished

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I sit for my causes!

.... really, I cannot see much reason to get upset half of the time. No matter how much I rant and rave, it won't make a difference anyway. At least I can have some fun arguing and doing my advocation for the devil.

What really matter is if the GDP is growing quicker than the population. But yes, if it's a good economy, the more new people you have coming in, the more the economy will grow. It will make your country an economic powerhouse. It's pretty much why we're so horribly powerful, because we're 300million strong, and why China and India are going to pass us eventually. But...just because your population isn't growing much, doesn't mean your economy will grind to a screeching halt. Like Awesomelyglorious pretty much said, look at Europe.

http://ideas.repec.org/p/inq/inqwps/ecineq2006-42.html

That may be an alternative way of estimating GDP Growth, but its not actually what GDP growth is.

A better measure of "well-offness" is GDP per capita or growth in GDP per Capita.

A centralised government may only be interested in total GDP because its a measure of how much resources they have to throw around compared to other countries. So a central government may not care if GDP per person is decreasing, so long as total GDP is increasing.

Eric Jones (British) wrote a great book called "The European Miracle" which looks at 1000 years of economic growth and develops a theory of why economic growth in European and Western countries has over a very long period of time outstripped other economies. An alternative theory was developed by North and Thomas (Americans), but Jones it better (IMO). If population growth was the key driver, India and China would have outstripped western countries.

People (and economies) adjust to their environment. Its countries where the power of the state has been mitigated, giving people more freedoms, which have the strongest growth. America has been so successful because of its federation of states, each (if only subtly) in competition with each other and keeping total power away from teh central government (although you may not think so, its historically true, relatively speaking). Likewise European countries "competed" against each other. This put a limit on the control of the state that non-western countries did not have.

IMO increasing centralised power is the greatest threat to a successful economy.

The theory applies to mostly developed market economies. As China has transitions to capitalism its growth rate has sky rocketed.
Having adequate population growth does not guaranteed economic growth anyway but without it there will be major problems growing.

yeah but


if China's population growth rate is slowing, why is the economic growth rate increasing

CIA https://www.cia.gov/library/publication ... nt/ch.html says estimated current fertility rate is 1.75 births per woman (below replacement rates).

IMO population growth supports GDP growth, but there is more to it.

Thats right. Capitalist reforms stimulated China's economy. They still have a birthrate like the US though. The theory applies to developed economies though where you allready have a Walmart in everytown.

No Walmart here

(but we do have K-Mart)

Yeah when everybody is fat , dumb and happy with the junk they buy and sale at their local K-mart. You need more young baby slobs to buy and sale more of that junk or K-mart and its suppliers stocks will crash and they will begin laying off people.

Little Boxes by Pete Seeger would be the perfect analogy to me. Now if only I could remember the words.....

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONEYGU_7EqU[/youtube]

I think people move to those countries with a more efficient economy because they seek to achieve well-being for themselves and their children or they can have more children there. That's explaining the correlation.

Thanx for that. Funny thing is, there should have been a verse about when the boys go off to war, and the little boxes would have been coffins..... Probably would have been too sensitive, I suppose.

Welfare needs checks and balances. Just tossing ALL poor people into one category as useless and throwing us to the dogs is not the answer. However, there does need to be some checks and balances against welfare or social security frauds.
For one, we have to keep our borders in tact and filter out illegal immigration. This is an ECONOMIC concern, not a racial concern. Because by all means, individual European aliens are just as much part of the problem as individual hispanics, or asians, or anyone else.
We need to make a cut-off on how many children a family is allowed to have. We don't want to be the next China or Japan or India in the levels of over-population. And often lazy individuals rob the welfare system just to spit babies out and live for free.
but that's just like with homeless people, sure there are tons of them who are quite simply just crack-addicted, alcoholic, lazy bums who don't wanna pull their own weight. But then there are those few who really ARE trying to improve their lives, who are struggling in vein to make a better life for themselves. I was once one of those type of homeless person, and I know the pains of hunger and the harshness of the winter, sleeping in alleyways under newspapers with one eye open to make sure I didn't get stabbed to death by some crazy crackhead.
Alot of uber conservatives claims that "the economy is great, there are tons of jobs out there", well obviously either they are in total denial or they are born into wealthy homes. Joe jobs might be "a dime a dozen", but joe jobs don't keep the bills up.
I'm not on welfare, but I am on disability, which is in some reguards like a trap, but in other reguards it provides me medicare and medicaid, which I wouldn't be able to afford if I went off of it.

Have to be careful about restricting births though. It hasnt exactly stopped China's huge birthrate, and leads to all sorts of horrific events like backstreet abortions, or newborn babies left in the gutter to die.

Further to my comment about stationary costs outweighing welfare costs in general, its worth noting that the UK benefits system is still almost entirely paper-based, no doubt contributing to its inefficiency and cost to run. If the systems were more efficient, they would cost even less of your tax money basically.