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Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders
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Re: Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders
#62Weird to read a post here from a foreign newspaper trying to describe what happened in my own country. But largely it's true, many people are unhappy with the amount of migration, the housing crisis, the rising cost of living and also what they feel is too much environmentalism. They feel that the parties that were in the government during the last 10 years did not take their concerns seriously or even made them wors…
Canada is not at all a crowded country, yet it has housing crisis. At least Netherlands had the foresight to create dense, urban spaces with cycling infrastructure and half decent public transit. All they need to do now is replicate this. The thing about environmental concerns is that the nos should be balanced with human quality of life, and in that lens the Dutch way really works better than many other developed co…
British Colombia has the same problem as California in that it is a lot of land but most of it is uninhabitable.
Re: Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders
#63Weird to read a post here from a foreign newspaper trying to describe what happened in my own country. But largely it's true, many people are unhappy with the amount of migration, the housing crisis, the rising cost of living and also what they feel is too much environmentalism. They feel that the parties that were in the government during the last 10 years did not take their concerns seriously or even made them wors…
PVV proposes to stop all immigration Is there a documented case in history where this has been beneficial ? Not attacking you btw, I'm actually wondering if anyone has known this to be effective? Immigrants seem like a token thing to get angry about when the chips are down and the country is mismanaged.
Its a problem of metrics, if you look at the conditions of the middle third of the population, then historically less migration is better as a rule. If you look at GDP then it's more muddy.
As an example the Australian immigration restriction act created some of the best conditions for workers, due to a high value of labour leading to high wages, increased negotiation power, and investment in labour saving innovation.
It was good for the nation and individual workers, but to use terminology familiar here, a single generation decided to enshitify the country and cash in, extracting all the present and future value of existing institutions.
Part of this is a massive propaganda campaign to try and convince you that every measure to restrict migration is racist or misguided... However migration is the most important and significant policy for a long term outcomes in a nation, we have millenia of history to show this.
Re: Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders
#64how bad of a housing crisis is in the netherlands? Wherever I look in europe there is a housing crisis for a reason or another.
The worst in Europe, and since much longer than any other country in Europe. It's common for Dutch universities to only accept international students on the condition that they (i.e. the student) manage to find housing themselves, because there have been many cases where they enrolled but just couldn't get housing anywhere. You don't see that in other countries. And it's been this bad for more than a decade.
Can universities not build their own dorms / halls of residence?
Re: Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders
#65Weird to read a post here from a foreign newspaper trying to describe what happened in my own country. But largely it's true, many people are unhappy with the amount of migration, the housing crisis, the rising cost of living and also what they feel is too much environmentalism. They feel that the parties that were in the government during the last 10 years did not take their concerns seriously or even made them wors…
> Apart from the economic problems that this might cause, it is simply not possible due to EU legislation.
It is possible. Don't give them money and only provide basic shelter. Do you wonder why the migrants don't stay in Eastern Europe? Because here we offer accomodation in tents. There isn't enough social housing for citizens (largely Roma), let alone migrants.
We have friends and neighbours from Germany who want retire early and to move back to Eastern Europe because they are unhappy with the federal government taxing them nearly ~500€ in order to house and feed migrants. These neighbours are working class people of retirement age, who left to Germany during the communist regime, leaving everything behind. There they were housed in a Lager common social housing with shared toilets and showers and they had to work to support themselves. Now they see how migrants are treated and view them as freeloaders. The fact that they're muslim and also cause problems doesn't help either.
So I'm not at all surprised the Dutch voted with Wilders.
Re: Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quote: Again this regulation comes from the EU so NL can't just change it This is -I think- (one of) the main reasons people voted PVV. We (the Dutch people) can't even make their own decisions! And when things fall apart (and they are: housing, inflation, too much environmentalism, declining healthcare, etc) this is exactly what we need: make decisions to fix this. But we 'can't' because of EU. This is extremely ang…
I would hope people would look at Brexit as a model of how well that line of thought works. Especially as we're seeing how ugly the downstream effects are years afterwards.
What are the British population's attitude towards this post-Brexit reality now? Has anyone reflected on it?
Re: Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hope people would look at Brexit as a model of how well that line of thought works. Especially as we're seeing how ugly the downstream effects are years afterwards.
What are the British population's attitude towards this post-Brexit reality now? Has anyone reflected on it?
Probably a 48%/52% split between "this is exactly what we said would happen" and "we've been hamstrung by leaders not negotiating a good deal"
Re: Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders
#68Weird to read a post here from a foreign newspaper trying to describe what happened in my own country. But largely it's true, many people are unhappy with the amount of migration, the housing crisis, the rising cost of living and also what they feel is too much environmentalism. They feel that the parties that were in the government during the last 10 years did not take their concerns seriously or even made them wors…
PVV proposes to stop all immigration Is there a documented case in history where this has been beneficial ? Not attacking you btw, I'm actually wondering if anyone has known this to be effective? Immigrants seem like a token thing to get angry about when the chips are down and the country is mismanaged.
It's difficult to look to historic precedent because the heart of all of these issues is fertility. This [1] is a graph of fertility rates in the US. Fertility rates just started plummeting catastrophically in the 60s. The exact same thing happened in the Netherlands. [2]
And that's what's causing the crisis. Fertility rates define not only the population in a region, but also the age distribution. Low fertility rates result in a population that will have many times more elderly people than youthful people, and will start shrinking far more rapidly than most realize. It will lead to both economic and social catastrophe. Trying to use mass immigration as a means of solving this problem is an inherently modern idea, because the problem did not exist in the past.
And IMO this isn't just an issue of management of a nation. Trying to create a stable economy and healthy society with a collapsing fertility rate may well just not be possible. On top of cultural conflicts there's also the fact you'll have to tax the death out of the youth in order to subsidize the elderly, at the same time those youth will find ever shrinking economic opportunities as your economy itself also naturally shrinks.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINUSA
[2] - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NLD/netherlands/fertil...
Re: Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression is that the government tried to 'solve' the problem with one main constraint in mind: to never allow the prices go down in any meaningful way. Hence the ham-fisted attempts to instead tweak taxes and ease credit conditions.
I guess that's the implicit constraint that none likes to talk about or admit. It doesn't help that no matter what you do, some population will be screwed over. I have seen that people who used to worry about not being able to afford a house, and who have now somehow managed to buy one, now start worrying about their house value going down. This cannot be solved with just one trick or just in a few years. You need st…
Definitely. People don't hate the game, they hate losing at the game.
Problems can be either solved in a constructive way (we see that's not going to happen) or in a nonconstructive way (societal explosion or breakdown of some sort). Or sometimes problems get superseded by bigger problems. Like when recently the home prices went down just a little bit, it was because of ECB's hand forced into fighting inflation with higher interest rates, which made mortgages less accessible.
Re: Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders
#70When you look at the electorate of the PVV in general, it consists of people who experience more difficulties to get by. They are more lonely... Sounds rather condescending. I don't like it when armchair experts place such subjective labels on people. "Lonely, less intelligent," etc. It's second guessing a persons vote which is a tacit way of undermining that vote. Rather they should analyze policy and try to underst…
A basket of deplorables
Funny coming from The Guardian, the working man's newspaper.