“Old Europe (Great Britan ,France, the Low Countries, Spain and Germany) are in the same situation today. Shrinking populations, stagnant economies, aimless leaders, political gamesmanship at the expense of the population, rising unemployment, unsupportable entitlement programs ”
There are many myths about Europe peddled by the US right, many of them listed here. Of those countries mentioned, only Germany has a shrinking population, the others are all growing.
The economies are not really ‘stagnant’ either, GDP per capita has been rising almost as fast as the USA in most of those countries (faster in some of them)and as we now know, the economic growth of the US over the past decade and a half has been exagerrated by the rising levels of unsustainable borrowing. The UK, Spain and Ireland have gone on the same borrowing binge that the US has but this has not occured in Germany and only to a limited extent in France and the low countries. Strip out the effect of this and western Europe has seen GDP per capita rise at around the same rate as the USA, admittedly this is not as good as the performance in the 60s and 70s when western Europe caught up rapidly with the US but it is no more stagnant or disastrous than other developed nations.
Unemployment is rising at the moment, as it is across the world but for the past several years, it has been falling rapidly, many European countries have lower unemployment than the US.
Finally entitlement programs are not unsupportable, the public just has to make a decision as to whether they want to support them or not.
