Swedish newspaper Expressen reports that Minister of Finance Magdalena Andersson has announced that the retirement age will be raised. It’s currently 65 years old, but that has to change.
The reason? Mass immigration.
The problem with mass immigration is that many immigrants are on welfare. While only 3.9 percent of native Swedes are unemployed, this number is a shocking 21.8 percent among those with an immigrant background. This causes major issues, one of which is that the welfare state is growing faster than revenue obtained through taxes.
Obviously, this cannot continue. Somehow, somewhere the government has to cut spending or raise taxes. The latter, however, is a problem, Andersson says. “I see that we need to raise state grants by another 20 billion next term in order to cope with this development,” she explained. “And then, priority must be given to welfare activities in the face of tax cuts.” She added that good government finances make it impossible to raise taxes at the moment.
So spending cuts it is. And who are the easy targets for cuts? That’s right, the elderly. After all, they are generally less organized than other potential victims. Workers are members of unions, immigrants have their own lobby groups, but the elderly have nobody.
You’d think that there would be another possible solution: restricting immigration. But no, that’s not what Andersson and her fellow cabinet members want to do. Immigration is, after all, untouchable. The more immigrants, the better — even when that’s clearly not the case. We’re talking about Sweden here after all.
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