What Has Happened to World Socialism?

"It is a rare report on any country that gives me hope any of us can tackle our mounting, disastrous debt problems, so I think I’ll revel in this one, from the unlikeliest of places— Sweden.



Sweden has reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP from 67% in 1993 to 49% today. It could soon have a smaller state than Britain. It has also cut the top marginal tax rate by 27 percentage points since 1983, to 57%, and scrapped a mare’s nest of taxes on property, gifts, wealth and this year it is cutting the corporate-tax rate from 26.3% to 22%.

Sweden has also donned the golden straitjacket of fiscal orthodoxy with its pledge to produce a fiscal surplus over the economic cycle. Its public debt fell from 70% of GDP in 1993 to 37% in 2010, and its budget moved from an 11% deficit to a surplus of 0.3% over the same period. This allowed a country with a small, open economy to recover quickly from the financial storm of 2007-08. Sweden has also put its pension system on a sound foundation, replacing a defined-benefit system with a defined-contribution one and making automatic adjustments for longer life expectancy.

The welfare state of the Nordic countries is still certainly generous, but it’s encouraging to see a society so defined by and proud of that lavishness can actually make some pretty fundamental changes. I mean, defined contribution pension plans and huge drops in tax rates and government spending as a percentage of GDP? I would have thought, if it sounds this good to me, it can’t be happening in Sweden, right? Wrong, and then there’s this:

Most daringly, it has introduced a universal system of school vouchers and invited private schools to compete with public ones. Private companies also vie with each other to provide state-funded health services and care for the elderly. Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist who lives in America, hopes that Sweden is pioneering “a new conservative model”; Brian Palmer, an American anthropologist who lives in Sweden, worries that it is turning into “the United States of Swedeamerica”.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/02/01/nordic-thaw-shrinking-the-state-in-sweden/

News Buzzard wrote:The United States clearly has a spending and revenue problem!