. one is can we borrow from other countries or other people or from our people and secondly, are our promises will they accept their promise to pay it back if we use the money for the purposes we borrowed it for the we will wisely administer it. be dead. and those issues are very tightly interwoven in this whole problem of the welfare state. but my friend will vogel, one of his solutions at least was to move towards means testing and more of it so that in a presumably rich country and one that is getting richer broadly speaking over time, individuals should be able to pay for more of their own benefits, i mean because society if you look out over the past 30 years at society it s a lot richer than it was. if you look over the past 100 years it s phenomenally more rich than it used to be. his ideas that you can shrink the welfare state by confining it more to the truly needy and freeing up other people to make their own arrangements. and i think that is not an unreasonable