{"id":10174,"date":"2020-02-28T19:48:10","date_gmt":"2020-02-28T19:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socialpanic.org\/?p=10174"},"modified":"2020-02-28T19:57:26","modified_gmt":"2020-02-28T19:57:26","slug":"politics-the-enduring-scandinavian-socialism-fantasy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/2020\/02\/28\/politics-the-enduring-scandinavian-socialism-fantasy\/","title":{"rendered":"Politics: The enduring Scandinavian socialism fantasy"},"content":{"rendered":"

This issue – of how propaganda messaging has created a fantasized Scandinavian utopia – has been covered extensively on this blog<\/a>. What people think they know about Scandinavian countries, and what U.S. politician’s routinely promote, is not true:<\/p>\n

Sanders\u2019s vision of Scandinavian countries, as with much of his ideology, seems to be stuck in the 1960s and 1970s, a period when these countries were indeed pioneers in creating a social market economy. In Sweden, government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product doubled from 1960 to 1980, going from approximately 30 percent to 60 percent. But as Swedish commentator Johan Norberg points out, this experiment in Sanders-style democratic socialism tanked the Swedish economy. Between 1970 and 1995, he notes, Sweden did not create a single net new job in the private sector. In 1991, a free-market prime minister, Carl Bildt, initiated a series of reforms to kick-start the economy. By the mid-2000s, Sweden had cut the size of its government by a third and emerged from its long economic slump.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Source: Bernie Sanders\u2019s Scandinavian fantasy – The Washington Post<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Sanders repeatedly refers to countries, such as Denmark, as successful examples of socialism, yet even the Danish prime minister says Denmark is not a socialist country or economy<\/a><\/p>\n

Proponents of hypothesized “Scandinavian socialism” leave out the taxes detail – if the U.S. had Denmark level taxation then:<\/p>\n

In the United States, this would mean that any income above $65,000 would be taxed at the rate of 55.9 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because few fact check these claims, false assertions made by politicians have established themselves as facts and conventional wisdom.<\/p>\n

In other words, bringing the economic system of Denmark, Sweden and Norway to the United States would mean embracing more flexible labor markets, light regulations and a deeper commitment to free trade. It would mean a more generous set of social benefits \u2014 to be paid for by taxes on the middle class and poor. If Sanders embraced all that, it would be radical indeed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some politicians and popular memes assert that Scandinavian socialism is a model for the world. Except the Scandinavian governments themselves note they are not socialist countries. They are free market economies with high taxes supporting a large social safety net; they are not socialist countries. If the U.S. had the same tax structure as Denmark, then you would pay an income tax of 55.9% above $65,000\/year in income.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-assertion","category-facts","category-internet-meme"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}