Puisque tout le monde aime parler modèle scandinave…
Depuis le début des années 2000, les États-Unis régressent vers le socialisme alors que les pays scandinaves progressent vers le libéralisme; d’ici deux ans, tous les pays scandinaves seront probablement plus capitalistes que les États-Unis.
Il n’est pas étonnant de constater que les pays scandinaves ont beaucoup mieux résisté à la crise que les Américains…
C’est pas le summum du libéralisme, mais j’échange le modèle suédois avec celui du Québec n’importe quand, ce qu’aucun gauchiste Québecois ne ferais jamais.
Un beau graphique pour expliquer le déclin de l’Empire..
Ouf. Très septique. Le Heritage Fondation constate une baisse depuis Obama, mais pas depuis les années 2000. J’ai pas lu celui de Fraser par contre. Mais juste au niveau des dépenses et de la taxation, les américains gagnent facilement (Californie incluse). Honnêtement, jamais je ne quitterais ma maison des Etats-Unis pour aller vivre en Scandinavie (justement pour des raisons de liberté economiques). Mais pour ton dernier commentaire à propos de la crise, tu as peut être généralisé un peu vite lol.
Un indice totalement idiot…
Pourquoi ne pas mettre en tête la Somalie et l’Ethiopie ou la liberté d’entreprendre est totale, ou il n’existe plus d’état, votre reve.., ou l’on peut démarrer n’importe quelle entreprise sans que l’état n’intervienne…
Plus d’impôts, plus de taxes, une société libertaire…
Déménagez, n’hésitez pas !!!
La Suède a été plus à droite que l’ADQ na jamais osé l’être.
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Un autre qui fait des commentaire sans faire l’effort de lire les sources d’info que je donne…
Un libertarien serait plus à son aise en Suède qu’aux USA.
En Europe toute une série de pays ont simplement raté la faillite de peu… Et en plus la « reprise » en Europe est plus lente qu’aux USA (pas peu dire) Ya rien là comme dirait l’autre…
Sweden’s secret recipe
Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy — the so-called ‘punk tax cutting’ agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result.
Three years on, it’s pretty clear who was right. ‘Look at Spain, Portugal or the UK, whose governments were arguing for large temporary stimulus,’ he says. ‘Well, we can see that very little of the stimulus went to the economy. But they are stuck with the debt.’ Tax-cutting Sweden, by contrast, had the fastest growth in Europe last year, when it also celebrated the abolition of its deficit. The recovery started just in time for the 2010 Swedish election, in which the Conservatives were re-elected for the first time in history.
He continued to cut taxes and cut welfare-spending to pay for it; he even cut property taxes for the rich to lure entrepreneurs back to Sweden. What even Borg did not expect was that his tax cut for the low-paid would increase economic growth so much that it has almost entirely paid for itself. Borg had created something that critics say does not exist: a self-financing tax cut.
Va lire le rapport, tu pourra constater qu’il n’y a AUCUNE liberté économique dans ces pays…
Mais c’est vrai, te demander de faire un effort de documentation avant de faire un commentaire c’est au dessus de tes forces…
Score de 7.76 vs 7.69….
Un libertarien est plus chez lui en Suède qu’aux USA, ça va au delà de l’économie (liberté sociale aussi).
Et même pour l’économie, la Suède offre un avenir plus brillant que les USA qui sombrent lentement mais sûrement dans la grande noirceur (alors que le ministre des finance en Suède est un libertarien).
“To speak of Sweden as socialist today is pretty far off the mark,” he says. “Neoliberal reforms have gone much further here in some sectors than in the US. Sweden has become a sort of laboratory for privatization in a way that the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute could only dream of.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0514/sweden-hardly-a-socialist-nightmare
Non je n’ai pas lu ta source. Je l’ai dit d’ailleurs. Je soulève seulement mon scepticisme, car les résultats sont très différents de la même enquête de l’Heritage Fondation. Et l’Index of Economic Freedom est beaucoup plus utilisé et répandu que l’indice de l’Institut Fraser.
Et je fais juste dire que ta dernière phrase généralise trop vite. Si on prend la même étude, mais avec les états et provinces du Canada et États-Unis, le Québec est en 60e sur 60. Le Nevada est 9e sur 60. Pourtant le Nevada a été l’un des états les plus affectés par la crise économique. Il y a beaucoup trop d’autres facteurs pour juger sur cet indicateur seulement.
Et oui je préfère vivre aux États-Unis qu’en Suède. Et je suis libertarien. Payer 25% en taxe de vente, jamais de la vie. Payer mon essence pratiquement 3$ le litre non merci également. Payer pratiquement la valeur d’une auto en taxes d’accises non merci. Payer plus que 50% de mes revenus en impôts non merci également. Abandonner mon assurance privée et mes hôpitaux privés pour me faire soigner par le gouvernement non merci. Payer une taxe sur les gras saturés non merci. Je me fiche d’avoir le transport en commun gratuit. Je me fiche d’avoir la gratuité scolaire, etc. Acheter mon électricité à une entreprise gouvernementale non merci. Payer une taxe sur le CO2 non merci. Payer autant de taxes sur la masse salariale non merci.
Je préfère d’ailleurs le pays en bas de ce graphique. Pas celui en haut : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Tax-Revenues-As-GDP-Percentage-%2875-05%29.JPG
T’as pas lu mais t’es septique…
Que dire de plus…
Encore une fois COMPLÈTEMENT dans l’erreur. L’indice du Fraser est celui qui fait autorité. Leur méthodologie a été publié dans la littérature scientifique. Menteur ou ignorant ?
Donc tu n’as aucun problème avec Rock Perry ?
En passant, il y a plusieurs erreurs factuelles dans ton paragraphe. Commençons par celle ou tu dis « acheter mon électricité à une entreprise gouvernementale non merci ».
Soi tu mens comme tu respires, soi tu est le roi des bullshitteur… Chaque fois que tu es pris dans un coin, tu racontes n’importe quoi pour te sortir d’impasse. Désolé, ici ça ne marche pas.
Rappelons pour le bénéfice des lecteur que nous avons affaire à un type qui déclare sans gêne « Non je n’ai pas lu ta source. Je l’ai dit d’ailleurs. Je soulève seulement mon scepticisme ». Il faut le faire…
Encore ta bullshit habituelle… Désolé de te l’apprendre mais tu as encore dans le chanp (menteur ou ignorant?).
La Suède taxe mais ne redistribue pas la richesse, voilà qui fait toute la différence.
http://www.antagoniste.net/2011/01/12/un-autre-clou-dans-le-cerceuil-du-modele-scandinave/
http://www.antagoniste.net/2010/05/14/le-modele-suedois-4/
http://www.antagoniste.net/2010/03/09/le-modele-suedois-3/
Tu veux arrêter d’avoir l’air fou, alors essaye de moins mentir et/ou de t’informer avant de faire un commentaire
En passant, il manque la Norvège et l’Islande (cherry picking?) dans ton graphique et la Finlande n’est pas un pays scandinave. Tu devrais dire pays nordiques plutôt
L’Islande en Scandinavie? Wow…
Et quel cherry-picking au juste ? Les USA descende et la Suède, Finlande et Danemark monte. Fact.
D’habitude tes billets sont plus rigoureux que ça et tu aurais remplacer la Finlande par la Norvège si tu avais vraiment voulu parler juste des pays scandinaves au lieu des pays nordiques.
Sometimes the term Scandinavia is also taken to include Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Finland, on account of their historical association with the Scandinavian countries.[2] Such usage, however, may be considered inaccurate in the area itself, where the term Nordic countries instead refers to this broader group.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia#cite_note-Nordic_Council-5
Tiens je vais flatter ton égo (démusuré?): voici un article posté du Economist qui dit pas mal la même chose que toi mais en parlant des pays nordiques: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571136-politicians-both-right-and-left-could-learn-nordic-countries-next-supermodel
Je te suggère de lire aussi les commentaires laissés par des Suédois qui prouvent qu’on est loin d’un paradis libertarien la-bas
PS. Les islandais seraient les plus proches descendants des vrais vickings faque si c’est pas des scandinaves qu’est-ce que ça prend de plus…
Je dis juste que Fraser est moins visible que Heritage Foundation. Fraser n’est pas rattaché avec un média international comme le Wall Street Journal et ses ressources financières sont 8 fois plus petites que Heritage Foundation. Le rapport Free the World est aussi beaucoup moins important sur Comscores que l’Index of Economic Freedom. J’ai peut-être sous-estimé l’importance de Fraser, mais en quoi je suis COMPLÈTEMENT dans l’erreur ?
La réalité n’est quand même pas si loin. La taxe de vente est bel et bien de 25%. L’essence j’ai exagéré mais elle est quand même actuellement autour de 2.30$. Le taux de taxation sur les voitures au Danemark et en Norvège est de 200%. Oui vraiment deux cent pour cent ! Le taux d’imposition suédois est de 57%. Le plus élevé de l’OCDE. Pour ce qui est de l’assurance santé rien de comparable au système suisse ou américain. La taxe sur le gras saturé existe depuis peu au Danemark. La gratuité du transport en commun et la gratuité universitaire existent tous les deux. Pour l’électricité ce n’est rien de comparable au modèle libéralisé de plusieurs états américains. Les pays scandinaves réglementent les prix et la distribution est toujours un monopole public. Le plus gros fournisseur d’électricité suédois est même entièrement gouvernemental. C’est déjà mieux que notre système, mais ça reste bien pire que plusieurs états américains. La Carbon Tax est là depuis des années. La taxe sur la masse salariale en Suède dépasse ridiculement le 35%. Comment ça menteur ou ignorant ?
Comment ça aucun problème avec Rick Perry ? Je t’ai dit que j’aimais Rick Perry pour ses positions économiques, mais pas pour ses positions sociales. Est-ce que tu lis mes commentaires ou tu fais juste écrire des bêtises ?
Est-ce que tu sais ce que signifie « scepticisme » ? Je n’ai pas toute l’information. Je suis donc septique plutôt que convaincu. Je ne dis pas que tu as tort. Faut vraiment être soupe au lait pour prendre personnel un « doute » d’un de tes lecteurs.
Ce n’est pas « ma » bulleshit. C’est un document de l’OCDE.
Martin, la définition de Scandinavie n’est pas claire en ce qui concerne l’Islande et la Finlande. Linguistiquement, l’Islande est dans le même bloc que NO/SE/DK mais pas la Finlande puisque le finnois n’est pas dans la même famille. Au niveau de la culture, dans le sens large de mode de vie, les 5 sont très similaires.
Économiquement, la Norvège est moins libéralisée que ses voisines mais je pense qu’elle passerait le test vis à vis des USA. L’Islande, pas certain, les contrôles des capitaux étant encore en vigueur établis en octobre 2008 (on ne peut pas sortir l’argent du pays).
La tradition politique de l’Islande est par contre nettement plus « anglo-saxonne ». Le Parti de l’Indépendance, conservateur, est historiquement le plus fort; contrairement à la Suède par exemple où les sociaux-démocrates ont été au pouvoir presque sans interruption de 1936 à 1994.
C’est anecdotique mais juste pour dire, en 1976, la radio publique islandaise a fait une série d’émissions sur la pensée libertarienne, par des gens associés aux pensées de Milton Friedman, et le journal de gauche Þjóðvillinn (« La Volonté de la Nation », quand on parle de récupération gauchiste!) avait fortement dénoncée cette « propagande payée par nos taxes » (ça vous dit quelque chose?).
Oui, parce que tout le monde sait que Barack Obama est un grand libertarien qui est en train de libéré les USA de l’emprise du gouvernement…
Crétin…
Martin est probablement assez cabochon pour me suggérer d’inclure les Terre-neuviens dans son prochain commentaire.
Menteur. Tu as dit: Et l’Index of Economic Freedom est beaucoup plus utilisé et répandu que l’indice de l’Institut Fraser. C’est faux. Va lire la littérature scientifique.
Aucun problème avec ce taux pûisque la Suède, avec la Suisse, est l’un des pays qui redistribue le moins la richesse. La Suède taxe Paul pour donner À Paul, pas pour donner à Pierre. T’as lu les liens que j’ai donné ou tu as encore été trop paresseux ?
Faux, archi faux, menteur ou ignorant ?
¸Sweden’s secret recipe
Advice from a successful – and tax-cutting – finance minister
When Europe’s finance ministers meet for a group photo, it’s easy to spot the rebel — Anders Borg has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy — the so-called ‘punk tax cutting’ agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result.
Three years on, it’s pretty clear who was right. ‘Look at Spain, Portugal or the UK, whose governments were arguing for large temporary stimulus,’ he says. ‘Well, we can see that very little of the stimulus went to the economy. But they are stuck with the debt.’ Tax-cutting Sweden, by contrast, had the fastest growth in Europe last year, when it also celebrated the abolition of its deficit. The recovery started just in time for the 2010 Swedish election, in which the Conservatives were re-elected for the first time in history.
All this has taken Borg from curiosity to celebrity. The Financial Times recently declared him the most effective finance minister in Europe. When we meet in his Stockholm office on a Friday afternoon (he and his aide seem to be the only two left in the building) he says he is just carrying on 20 years of reform. ‘Sweden was a textbook case of European economic sclerosis. Very high taxes and huge regulatory burden.’ An economic crisis in the early 1990s forced Sweden on the road to balanced budgets, and Borg was determined the 2007 crash would not stop him cutting the size of government.
‘Everybody was told “stimulus, stimulus, stimulus”,’ he says — referring to the EU, IMF and the alphabet soup of agencies urging a global, debt-fuelled spending splurge. Borg, an economist, couldn’t work out how this would help. ‘It was surprising that Europe, given what we experienced in the 1970s and 80s with structural unemployment, believed that short-term Keynesianism could solve the problem.’ Non-economists, he says, ‘might have a tendency to fall for those kinds of messages’.
He continued to cut taxes and cut welfare-spending to pay for it; he even cut property taxes for the rich to lure entrepreneurs back to Sweden. The last bit was the most unpopular, but for Borg, economic recovery starts with entrepreneurs. If cutting taxes for the rich encouraged risk-taking, then it had to be done. ‘In most cases, the company would not have been created without the owner,’ he says. ‘There would be no Ikea without [Ingvar] Kamprad. We would not have Tetra-Pak without [Ruben] Rausing. They are probably the foremost entrepreneurs we have had in the last few decades, and both moved out of Sweden.’
But they were not rich, I say, when they were starting out. ‘No, but they were becoming rich. If you have a high wealth tax and an inheritance tax, people emigrate because it becomes too costly to own a company. Ownership is a production factor. Entrepreneurs are a production factor. Yes, these people are rich and you can obviously argue that we want to encourage social cohesion. But it is also problematic if you drive out entrepreneurs from your country, because they are the source of job creation.’
Just as George Osborne took a hit for reducing the 52p tax to a 47p tax, so Borg’s party paid an political price for helping the rich. ‘If you are going to survive that politically, it is very important to cut taxes on low-income earners.’ He focused the tax credit on the low-paid, giving some the equivalent of a month’s extra salary every year. But there was still resentment. ‘We lost a lot of voters when we cut the property and the wealth tax, I don’t make any excuse for that. It was a severe blow to our support.’
This is the only time in the interview when Borg speaks like the politician he claims not to be. ‘When I look at other politicians I tend to see myself more as an economist,’ he says. This is true in that he is appointed, not elected, and was chief economist for SEB bank. But before this, he was a young libertarian longing to turn the world upside-down. Internet footage still exists of a denim-clad Borg declaring on television that if he was prime minister he ‘wouldn’t do a damn thing, so the people could do whatever they want’. When he later became a prime ministerial adviser, he caused a stir when it emerged that a government staffer backed drug legalisation.
When Fredrik Reinfeldt became party leader in 2003, he made Borg his right-hand man. It seemed a gamble at the time, but his faith in Borg’s expertise was absolute — Borg’s views had moderated, but his sense of urgency had not. ‘We came into government in October 2006 and we launched tax cuts in January 2007,’ he says, ‘so the first three months were extremely hectic.’ The Conservatives’ slogan was striking: ‘We are the new workers’ party.’ Tax rates would be cut for workers, and welfare cut to pay for it. High welfare levels, he says, can inflict cruelty in the name of compassion. ‘People emigrate from the labour market. Unemployment traps capture a lot of people in social exclusion.’ Tax cuts are not spoken of as an ideological aim, but as a tool to cut unemployment and advance social justice.
What even Borg did not expect was that his tax cut for the low-paid would increase economic growth so much that it has almost entirely paid for itself. Borg had created something that Osborne’s critics say does not exist: a self-financing tax cut. ‘There was some criticism at the time that we were borrowing to finance tax cuts,’ he says. But Sweden could do it, because it was expecting to return to surplus soon; Britain has no such luxury, he says. His main advice to Osborne is: ‘Keep on dealing with the deficit, because deficits destroy everything else.’
Borg and Osborne have a good relationship, as do David Cameron and Reinfeldt (who keep in touch via text message). All are men in their early forties, who pick fights with the old guard of their parties to flaunt their ‘modernising’ credentials. But politics in Britain and Sweden are as different now as they were in the 1980s, except the roles are reversed. Sweden is the unlikely champion of supply-side economics, with ideas too radical for Brits. There is cross-party support in Sweden for profit-seeking state schools, which Michael Gove won’t attempt. Borg’s tax-cutting policy was accompanied by a 268-page book explaining the dynamic link between lower taxes and more jobs. Such a document would be unthinkable from HM Treasury.
Sound economics is simply a far larger part of the government mission in Sweden than in Britain. Cameron once observed that no one ‘gets up in the morning thinking “I wish the state was smaller”,’ which is perhaps true in Whitehall. But not in Stockholm where, on Reinfeldt’s 45th birthday, Borg presented him with a graph showing Sweden’s tax-to-GDP ratio dipping under the 45 per cent mark for the first time in decades. That is still, of course, one of the highest rates in the world.
In public, Borg is not in the least triumphalist — if anything, he’s trying to stir up a bit of pessimism. Success has meant he now has to manage expectations, and Borg has taken to warning in his speeches that ‘a future economic crisis is as much a certainty in life as death and taxes’. He could add another certainty: that high taxes will slow down any economic recovery, and fortune tends to favour politicians who do something about that.
Sweden hardly a ‘socialist nightmare’
As Obama tries to rein in Wall Street and raise taxes on the wealthy, critics say he is trying to turn America into Sweden. Meanwhile, in Sweden, it’s full-speed ahead for capitalism.
There is a long tradition of using Sweden as a socialist model to highlight social shortcomings in the United States. Recent tax change proposals by the Obama administration, for instance, had conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly asking his viewers, « Do we really want to change America into Sweden? »
Yet if the Scandinavian model were shipped across the Atlantic, the changes would have little to do with socialism, say analysts here. In fact, some believe it should be held up as a bastion of market capitalism.
Last week, the country’s center-right government began selling off state-owned pharmacies, one of the country’s few remaining nationalized companies, as part of an ambitious program of liberal economic reforms started in 2006. In the same week, a study by the Swedish Unemployment Insurance Board revealed that almost half of the country’s jobless lacked full unemployment benefits. Many opted out of the state scheme when the cost of membership was raised last year; others were ineligible.
State pensions, schools, healthcare, public transport, and post offices have been fully or partly privatized over the last decade, making Sweden one of the most free market orientated economies in the world, analysts say.
“Sweden has always been on the side of the market economy. This is not socialism,” says Olle Wästberg, director of the Swedish Institute in Stockholm, and a former Consul General to New York. “In many fields, we have more private ownership compared to other European countries, and to America. About 80 percent of all new schools are privately run, as are the railroads and the subway system.”
Stereotypical images of Sweden as a socialist utopia date back to the 1930s, when a best selling book by Marquis Childs lauded the country as a middle way between capitalism and socialism.
“Eisenhower also helped to propagate a number of myths in the ’60s when he said that Swedes were ‘addicted to sin, socialism, and suicide,’ » says Brian Palmer, professor of anthropology at Sweden’s Uppsala University (read a past Monitor story on the professor here).
Images of all three Swedish vices were given a good dusting off and a 21st century remake last month on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show (watch the first part of the report here and the second part here). The hilarious « investigation » into the « socialist nightmare » state revealed that, apart from producing famed meatballs and red gummy fish candy, « socialism has left this population ravaged, dispirited, and hauntingly thin. » The last observation was made as the reporter watched beautiful Swedish women walk down the street.
Jokes aside, Professor Palmer, who ran a controversial course on globalization at Harvard University from 2000 to 2004, believes that Sweden has been one step ahead of the US in adopting and extending economic reforms.
“To speak of Sweden as socialist today is pretty far off the mark,” he says. “Neoliberal reforms have gone much further here in some sectors than in the US. Sweden has become a sort of laboratory for privatization in a way that the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute could only dream of.”
Swedish Lessons for Ed Balls
To Brits, Sweden with its tightly regulated social welfare state is often a byword for socialism. But in the last two decades the country has been transformed. today it offers a flexible and dynamic European model with ever falling public expenditure, lower taxes, economic growth and budget surpluses.
After many years of absence from the Swedish debate, I attended a conference on the Swedish economy in the southern city of Malmö in May, organized by Swedbank. The 180 speakers represented the full range of Swedish views, which have moved amazingly far to the free-market right, not least social democrats and trade union leaders. Key values are competition, openness and efficiency, while social and environmental values remain. The idea is not to abolish social welfare but to make it more efficient through competition among private providers. A new consensus has emerged on having a social welfare society rather than a social welfare state.
The changes have been dramatic. While Sweden’s public expenditure has fallen by one-fifth of gross domestic product since 1993, between 2000 and 2009 Britain’s public expenditure skyrocketed by 15 per cent. This has brought Swedish and British public spending to a similar level, but Sweden’s is still steadily falling. Swedish taxes have been cut and her markets have opened up. The Social Democratic Party was in power from 1932 until 1976, and again from 1994 until 2006, but Sweden was actually quite a liberal market economy until 1968. After a century of superior growth, its GDP per capita was the third highest in the world.
But in 1968 left-wing madness took over. Our economic success had been too great, making the government take high economic growth as a given, and the left-wing wind that blew through the world in the late 1960s was particularly strong in Sweden. But the decisive reason was the election of the extreme socialist Olof Palme as prime minister in 1969. He dominated Swedish politics until he was murdered on the street in Stockholm in 1986. His murder remains unsolved, but it became a turning point for Swedish politics. Palme ruled with great force. From 1970 until 1989, he raised taxes, including wealth tax, to more than 100 per cent of income for the wealthy, while social security exploded. Palme undermined the rule of law through retroactive legislation and arbitrary state intervention. A major scheme for gradual nationalisation of Swedish corporations through a punitive tax on their profits, using the money to buy their shares, was adopted.
Arguably, Sweden is the only old nation that has never gone through a revolution, and the people stayed obedient and peaceful in the face of this onslaught. Private initiative was the victim. Since everybody was paid full wages when taking sick leave, Swedes recorded more sick days than any other nation. The truly wealthy emigrated en masse whereas others worked less. Two decades of low growth ensued, and by 1990 GDP per capita had fallen to 18th in the world. . . . In 1992, like Britain, Sweden was forced into an uncontrolled devaluation of its currency. Unemployment surged and so did public expenditure that peaked at 71 per cent of GDP in 1993, when the budget deficit reached 11 per cent of GDP.
Finally, in September 1991, the social democrats lost an election and a real non-socialist government under Carl Bildt came into office from 1991 to 1994. Although it was a four-party minority government, it took many radical decisions and broke the trend. It turned the country around. Sweden had been influenced by the free market ideology of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. . . .
The government trimmed all kinds of social security payments to reasonable levels. Sickness leave has fallen by half since employees are no longer paid from the first day or in full. Today, Sweden has regular budget surpluses, although tax revenues have been reduced by 9 per cent of GDP from 1994 until 2011. Sweden’s main scourge was tax. In 1990, the social democratic government actually cut sky-high marginal income tax from 90 per cent to 50 per cent. The current government has decreased taxes every year and abolished the wealth tax. Inheritance tax and gift tax are also gone. A corporate profit tax of 26 per cent may seem reasonable, but tax competition is fierce in this part of Europe, as most East European countries have slashed corporate taxes to 15-19 per cent. Business wants to reduce the corporate profit tax to 20 per cent.
One of the greatest reliefs is the simplification of tax administration. Since the tax reforms of 1990 abolished almost all deductions, while cutting rates, tax declarations have become extremely simple. Ninety per cent of taxpayers simply confirm with a phone message that the declaration automatically prepared by the tax authorities for them is correct. Pensions have been subject to a major reform, giving everybody a pension in accordance with their contributions plus a minimum pension for all. As a consequence, the Swedish pension system is actuarially correct without any pay-as-you-go system or implicit pension debt. It is also transparent so that all can see how large a retirement capital they have saved, and to a considerable extent they can choose when and how to invest it and access it.
The Swedish school system, Palme’s original bailiwick, was badly ravaged by left-wing reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, all pupils are entitled to school vouchers of equal value for each child of a certain age. Their parents can allocate this school voucher to any school the child is qualified to enter. As a result, while in the 1970s Sweden had only four private schools, one-fifth of Swedish secondary schools are now private, some for profit, others cooperatives or non-profit foundations. Yet, in international school comparisons, Sweden lags behind Finland that never carried out any foolish left-wing reforms.
. . . The Riksbank used to be little more than a subdepartment of the ministry of finance, but now it is independent. Today Sweden has persistently one of the lowest inflation rates in Europe. In 2003, a referendum dismissed euro adoption.
One of the first decisions of the Bildt government was to abolish the wage-earners’ funds (sharing company profits with employees) and stop all nationalisation. . . . Swedish governments have quietly deregulated one market after another, contributing to greater economic dynamism.The annual centralised wage bargaining between the Trade Union Confederation (LO) and SAF was the pride of the old Swedish model. But in the 1970s it led to inflation and strikes, and today this system is long gone. Wage bargaining is still collective, but it is becoming increasingly decentralised. Wage inflation is no longer a concern and strikes are extremely rare. The employers have won, but real wages are rising with productivity. As everywhere, trade unions are losing members, money, and power. The Trade Union Confederation has adjusted, its chair declaring recently: ‘We want flexibility on the labour market.’
As the Thatcher revolution exemplified, real ideological victory is when your opponents steal your clothes. In 1994, the social democrats under Göran Persson returned to power and stayed until 2006. Although they complained about all the cuts the non-socialist government had undertaken and carried out few reforms, they did not revoke the reforms but completed fiscal tightening. It was actually Persson who abolished the inheritance and gift taxes.
. . .
Keynesianism remains disliked in Sweden. Before the global financial crisis Sweden had a budget surplus on average of 2.5 per cent of GDP in the years 2004?7. After a minimal budget deficit in 2009, it has once again a budget surplus. . . .
Swedes shake their heads when they see the economic policy in euro crisis countries. They take their cue from their own crisis in the early 1990s and call for far more expenditure cuts and structural reforms. Finance Minister Borg argues against more expansionary policy in Sweden in case the euro crisis should lead to a real meltdown. The right-wing drift of the much reduced Social Democratic Party continues, making it reminiscent of New Labour. Its brand-new leader, Stefan Löfven, came to prominence during the global financial crisis, when he and the metalworkers’ union agreed to major wage cuts to safeguard their real incomes in the long run. The social democrats have not only joined the free market consensus, but seem to attack the current government from the right, demanding a better business environment. Gone are demands for the restoration of social benefits. Opinion polls have rewarded the social democrats for their right turn with sharply improved ratings. The left-wing intellectuals are also gone. The old socialist think tanks have closed down. The Centre for Labour Market Studies was a state institution, and the non-socialist government closed it, since it did not generate research but left-wing propaganda. The Trade Union Organisation had a sophisticated research institute, which it eliminated for not being sufficiently political. The trade union economists, who dominated the Swedish economic debate in the 1970s and 1980s, have been replaced by bank economists. The free-market right has won the debate and maintains substantial think tanks in Stockholm. Their main problem is a lack of resistance.
Sweden is not alone. Developments are similar in the other Scandinavian countries, the Baltic countries, and Poland. The Swedish about turn is the most dramatic. While its direction is clear, much remains to be done. The Baltic states look very attractive with public expenditures around 35 per cent of GDP and low, flat income taxes. They are a source of inspiration for their Scandinavian neighbours. In the last two years, five incumbent EU governments have been re-elected, namely centre-right governments in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, showing that the new North European conservatism enjoys popular support.
Elle est bonne. Je lis tes commentaire, je signale tes contradiction et tu deviens frustré (tu viens probablement d’un milieu ou tu n’est pas habitué à être challengé).
Mais on va régler cette histoire très rapidement: Barack Obama vs Rick Perry, pour qui tu vote ?
Quand on ne sait pas, on ferme sa gueule.
J’ai cité des chiffre de l’OCDE, toi tu bullshhit sans savoir, tu l’as admis.