Sweden’s Economic Boom Shows Promise In Democratic-Socialist Societies
While here in America where half of the population makes less than $30,000 a year, and where the top one tenth of one percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 50% of Americans, Sweden’s equality and economy is incomparable to the United States’.
Bloomberg reports: (https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-05-07/a-reverse-trump-tax-plan-delivers-an-economic-miracle-in-sweden)
High taxes, strong unions and an equal distribution of wealth. That’s the recipe for success in a globalized world, according to Magdalena Andersson, the Social Democratic economist who’s also Sweden’s finance minister. The 50-year-old has been raising taxes and spending more on welfare since winning power in 2014. She’s also overseen an economic boom, with Swedish growth rates topping 4 percent early last year, that has turned budget deficits into surpluses.
In a world still flinching from the financial crisis that hit a decade ago and the populist wave that followed, Sweden’s economic stewardship holds lessons that challenge the conventional wisdom in the U.S. on how taxes work, according to the Harvard-educated minister. Speaking in an interview in Stockholm, Andersson says success comes down to “three things: It’s the jobs, it’s our welfare and it’s our redistribution.”
Wait, but don’t higher taxes and more spending on welfare and social programs tank an economy like the right wing and the corporate media say? How could Sweden’s economy possibly be surviving right now?
Sweden has one of the world’s highest tax burdens, with tax revenue about 43 percent of GDP, according to OECD data. The equivalent figure for the U.S. is about 26 percent. Sweden’s economy has grown almost twice as fast as America’s, expanding 3.1 percent last year, compared with 1.6 percent in the U.S.
Oh wait, higher taxes that are used for education and healthcare so that more people can be productive members of society actually helps the economy, instead of hindering the economy. Let’s remember, the time that is so much praised for an economic boom, the 1950’s, had the highest top tax rates in American history.
But hold on, by being provided education and healthcare without working for it, that must mean that the Swedish people don’t work hard, don’t participate in labor, and are just a bunch of lazy free-riders who don’t do anything and just get handed everything on a silver platter.
Sweden has the highest labor force participation in the European Union. Andersson attributes this to tax-funded parental leave and affordable daycare, which make it easier for both parents to work.
Oh wait, when you give people a better life and their children a better life, they don’t just disappear from their society, they give back, spend on the economy, and go to work.
The economic benefits can also be seen through visual representation.
The one right above is one of the most telling of these graphs, showing just how much of a difference there is in comparing the income inequality in the US (purple and white) and the income inequality, or equality in Sweden (red and blue).
So, if you do everything that the right wing (and even some of the left wing) tells you not to do, raise taxes on the wealthy, support strong unions, create a single-payer healthcare system, have tuition-free college, and fund other social programs, your economy will sky-rocket.
Wait, let’s slow down here, says the right wing, Sweden’s society is very different from America’s society, and these differences allow for this type of system to succeed, this could never succeed in America; we have a way bigger society than Sweden does, hundreds of millions, unlike Sweden.
But, after searching through the logic of this common counter-argument, it is found that a greater population means more tax payers, which means more money to pay for more people, which means that population size doesn’t make a difference.
So, what are we waiting for? Why stick with a system that’s throwing hundreds of millions of Americans under the bus, when we could adopt a system that has transformed the economies of dozens of modern countries, and transformed the lives of the people within those countries. If looking at historical and current records, the system that is seen to work best is not libertarian capitalism, is not totalitarian communism, but rather a combination of regulated capitalism, and democratic socialism. Let’s do it already.
