The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

by Patrick J. Buchanan

By 2050, a third of Europe’s people will be over sixty. In the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, one in ten will be over eighty!3 The median age of a European will be fifty, nine years above the median age of the oldest nation on earth today, Japan. In Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America and the World, former commerce secretary Pete Peterson writes: Within the next thirty years, the official projections suggest that governments in most developed countries will have to spend at least an extra 9 to 16 percent of GDP annually simply to meet their old age benefit promises. To pay these costs through increased taxation would raise the total tax burden by an unthinkable extra 25 to 40 percent of every worker’s taxable wages—in countries where total payroll tax rates often already exceed 40 percent. Or, if we resort to deficit spending, we would have to consume all the savings and more of the entire developed world.