[bootlegga]

andyt wrote:

bootlegga wrote:

andyt wrote:

How about we have people work until later in life, raise our taxes and cut back in government services to deal with this issue, since there will definitely be a point where we just can't keep adding people to the planet in order to avoid this problem?

Get people to work longer, pay more taxes and accept fewer services? What colour is the sky in your world?



Your heart is in the right place, but your brain is in la-la-land.

It'll never happen, simply because there isn't a politician in the world that could get elected with that platform.

It will happen because we have to do it - the question is just how long we continue to live in la-la-land before we wake up. The later we do, the harder things will be.

I doubt it.

Even conservative reformers like Ralph Klein can only cut so far and for so long before the voters threaten them with being ousted, and then out comes the Ralph Bucks or natural gas rebate checks or lowered GST (that's a Harper example) or whatever.

Like I said, your heart is in the right place, and I wish it could be the way you suggest, but far too many Canadians wouldn't put up with such measures for very long. Canadians will accept cuts when absolutely necessary (when faced with a crisis or a huge deficit for example), but not permanently.

[andyt]

We are faced with a crisis, one that will only get worse - look around you - we won't stay isolated from the world.

Who knows what the future holds about our standard of living having to be reigned in, but what I see for the foreseeable future it will have to be.

The west has bee living beyond it's means for quite some time. The "east" wants to live like the west, but with the numbers of people they have it's impossible. As I said, China for instance is facing a demographic crisis that makes ours pale by comparison. Sooner or later we're going to have to figure out how to live with a global population that's older than it is now, with fewer productive members. Or, of course we can let nature take it's course with famines or wars or disease that kills enough people that there will be another baby boom again and all will be well. For a while.