The New European Revolt

Some young Europeans have given up on change. They just want to leave.

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zerohedge.com
May 11, 2013

One of the main benefits of forecasts based on demographics is the fact that they can be more precise and therefore more reliable than others. For example, the number of people aged 40 in the United States twenty years from now is roughly the same number of people aged 20 today, minus premature deaths plus new immigrants. A prediction that enjoys a similar inevitability is that welfare programs as currently defined will certainly be unaffordable a few years from now, given the aging of the population and concomitant rising dependency ratio.

It is a fair bet that one way or another, the current generation of young people will be unwilling and/or unable to pay for Social Security and Medicare as they presently stand. Of course, Western Europe has the same problem and President Hollande of France recently got a whiff of what is coming from an open letter addressed to him by a 20-year old student* named Clara G. and published in the magazine Le Point.

In summary, Clara does not believe it fair that she and her generation should be saddled with the enormous debt accumulated by Mr. Hollande’s generation. As a remedy, she is considering leaving France for friendlier pastures. She says she is not alone and cites a recent poll by Viavoice which found that a shocking 50% of respondents aged 18-34 answered ‘yes’ to the question “if given the opportunity, would you like to leave France to live in another country?”. Forty-five years after the upheavals of Mai 68, an important segment of the young are more interested in exile than in change.

Addressing the President directly, she writes:

“This will probably shock you, but it is mainly for fiscal reasons,… simply because I do not feel like working all my life to pay taxes, a large part of which will only service the 1.9 trillion Euros of debt that your generation has kindly left us. If these borrowings had at least been invested to prepare the future of the country, if I was getting a small benefit from them, it would not be a problem for me to help repay them. But this debt only helped your generation live above its means, and assure

This article originally appeared on : Infowars