ethan

I am somewhat surprised that you would look to China, a communist country, for solutions.

there are several things wrong with what you say.

1. Britian is not China, we are a liberal free market state, not a centrally planned economy, where taxing, pensions ect are completely different form the capitalist system. The government could never tell the people how many children to have or not have. nor should it. we believe in freedom, or so i thought.

2. Curbing childbirth now would not help the demographic crisis we are heading on in the next 10 years. and that is mostly caused by birthrates form the late 1950's early 1960's, and people living longer (unless you want to curb that too).

3. you misunderstand the nature of the crisis, it is about 'waves' of birthrates. there is currently a mini 'baby boom' going on demographically, but obviosuly, it will be a good 20 years before those babies become productive members of the economy.

4. the one child policy is actually going to be leaving china soon. why? because it had a number of problems:

a. Human rights violations
b. gender-based birthrate disparity (i.e. these is a shortage of women in china)
c. abandoned and orphaned children
d. infanticide.
e. The "Four-Two-One" problem. in other words, it has created its own demographic cirisis. There are not enough young people around to look after older ones:
"As the one-child policy begins to near its next generation, one adult child is left with having to provide support for his two parents and four grandparents. This leaves the older generation with more of a dependency on retirement funds or charity in order to have support. If personal savings, pensions, or state welfare should fail, then the most senior citizens would be left entirely dependent upon their very small family or neighbors for support. If a child can't care for their parents and grandparents, or if that child can't survive, the oldest generation could find itself destitute.[42] To combat this problem, some provinces allow families where each parent was an "only child" to have two children."

to quote wikipedia again:

"In fact, the one child policy had a detrimental effect on China overall."

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