[Magdalen] immigration / migrant situation --->Re: Professionalpanhandlers; was Loaned out.

[Roger Stokes]

On 14/09/2015 13:51, Jim Guthrie wrote:
>> So many of the stories we hear in the US about how balanced some of 
>> the W European and Scandinavian countries are with employment, social 
>> structure are wonderful, but they are also much smaller countries 
>> than the US with perhaps more government control of many aspects of 
>> society in regard to wager, medical costs, pensions, etc.
>
> Small doesn’t mean much. What is important is the social and economic 
> benefits derived from a far more concentrated population. Dense 
> population lowers things like infrastructure costs (which allows 
> better infrastructure) for example. That leaves far more money for the 
> social programs we all admire.
>
> But that better and more concentrated infrastructure also makes it 
> easier to take in migrations as we're seeing, because the costs of 
> taking them in are intrinsically lower than they would be in the U.S.

I don't think you have the full answer there.  The popilation density of 
the USA is about 85 per square mile.  This compares with 56 in Sweden, 
47 for Finland, 44 New Zealand, 9.4 Canada and about 8 in Australia.  I 
agree that the transport infrastructure needs attention and it was folly 
to ignore it for so long.

The polls indicate that the electorate is getting fed up with 
professional politicians who are out of touch with what life is like for 
the majority.  (The BBC broadcast a Point of View on the US presidential 
race yesterday http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34199866 ) What is 
noticeable when comparing US cities with those in other countries is the 
size of individual plots in the suburbs.  They tend to be larger than 
elsewhere, thus meaning more street distance between houses with the 
proportionate increase in servicing them.

Roger