Читать книгу Fearful Symmetry - the Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values - Brian Lee Crowley - Страница 18

Population aging and declining fertility, however, will require us to make choices. On the one hand, we have the option of a continued expansion of the state and its allied economic underperformance. On the other hand, we might choose rolling back the size of government and unleashing the productive power of Canadians to make more through taking less. This phenomenon of population aging pressing governments to reduce their take is already observable in Europe, which is farther along the curve of demographic decline than we are. For instance Sweden, the archetypal welfare state, has been forced by demographic change to reduce the take of government from the economy.53

In fact the decline in size of government over the last decade (of which Sweden is a striking example) is led by European economies “that are experiencing the third phase of demographic transition, lower fertility rates, which are exacerbating the problem of an aging population with higher life expectancy rates. These developments are forcing government to reduce its size.”

In any case, just to maintain the current levels of public services and programs to a rapidly aging population is expensive. If we left current levels of taxation alone and current benefit entitlements unchanged, the results of aging on our federal and provincial budgets would be sobering indeed. Pierre Fortin, a Quebec economist, has looked at the cost increases (pensions, health care, etc.) of an aging population and set them against the cost savings (e.g. lower program costs for young people, such as education) in 2020. If the conditions he projects in 2020 were to have obtained in 2008, he calculates that it would have left a hole in federal and provincial budgets combined of roughly $40 billion.54

As daunting as the future fiscal affordability of our past behaviour might be, however, Canadians might nevertheless prefer to keep on the same path they have been on, even at the cost of lower growth, weaker incomes, and high cost of government with little to show for it, if they think that they are getting other important benefits. This has certainly been the message of much of the political class of the last fifty years, that Canada is one of the top countries in the world, that we are nicer, kinder, and gentler than Americans, that we have shed an uptight colonial past and have entered a brave new world of equality and freedom guaranteed by big government.

Too bad this message is self-serving twaddle.