You can do what the democrats have talked about, which we have successfully done in Nordic countries which is to spend a lot of money on re-educating the workforce and making sure those at the bottom get decent skills.
I grew up in a rustbelt like industrial town in Norway. We has shipyards, glass factory, paper mill, textile industry, lock systems etc. Almost all of it got closed down and moved overseas as I grew up.
But we never ended up in the deep pit blue collar America ended up in, because government took a very active stance early to fight this with active policies. In towns where factories died, they moved public sector jobs from the capital.
People got a lot of retraining for new jobs. There is a strong system for vocational training in technical jobs like Germany so people could get skills for more advance jobs which was easier to keep when competing against asian industrial giants.
Our government offers free university education, so even less well off blue collar families could send their kids to good schools. And when economic times got harder it never hit blue collar works as hard as in America because we have free universal health care, heavily subsidized childcare, good pensions for everybody.
Basically the welfare system we built up saved our blue collar workers. Yet Americans pretend that there is no solution to this problem except attacking minorities, Mexico, China etc.
It is rich people like Trump and their agenda, which has made sure that blue collar workers in America have felt the influence of globalization harder than many other blue collar workers in the west.
USA does not have an oil fund that amounts do $150k per capita to pay for "free everything" (university education, universal health care, childcare) and good pensions for everybody.
Norway generates more revenue with oil than the entires US of A, for 5 million people, and is third worldwide exporter for Natural Gas just behind Qatar and Russia, again with only 5 million people to serve (less than the population of New York)
The policies you enjoy are paid for by those revenue, and are not applicable to "regular" countries.
I admit tho that your politician did a good job at ensuring that those revenue are used for the good of the general population and are managed with the future in mind.
You've also got a top marginal personal income tax rate approaching 60% which is nearly twice that of the US and political suicide.
I'm not making a judgment for or against high marginal taxes, I'm just saying "the US could do it too" ignores, well... the very core of economic and tax policy in the US.
Well, it's important to engage the political realities. Doesn't make it impossible, but a hybrid proposal or smaller first step might be more practical, given the politics.
Yes, in the US, the taxation of the Nordic countries won't work and the socialist approach to services is also not accepted by half of the country.
Two key ideas, however, could be implemented:
--- IDEA 1 - REALLY EDUCATE people on WHY they need to get new vocational training.
Currently too many people are being given false promises of the return of working class jobs that are not coming back. It's not just globalization that has caused the loss of these jobs, but also technology advances that have made many of these jobs obsolete.
Your blue collar worker today isn't going to get a job moving metal equipment from one place to another because a machine can do it much more efficiently 24/7. Our capitalistic society means that a corporation will seek to create maximum efficiency to generate maximum profit. Corporations aren't in the business of maximizing the number of employees, but rather maximizing the return per resources invested in the organization. And that means, excuse my somewhat callous statement, that people are viewed as resources to the organizations, a means to generating profit. If a machine is able to perform a function faster, longer, for less overall money than an employee, a corporation will seek for that alternative.
So when many politicians make promises of bringing back good jobs. They AREN'T telling people WHAT JOBS are coming back. In fact, when you look at manufacturing jobs in the US, we currently CAN'T FILL THEM.
The problem is that your blue collar worker still expects a manual, low skill manufacturing job. But the job the US corporation wants is a manufacturing person who has a math or CS degree who can program or operate a high-end automation machine. Who can manage the CNC process or who can input the specifications for highly detailed technical operations. This requires specific training, math, engineering, or certifications.
This is the truth that more politicians need to hammer home to the people, then government follows up making sure that there is an incentive for educational institutions to allocate resources to teach these people.
But today, we're still stuck in: politicians claim that it's federal government's fault that they don't have a job, and that electing them instead will magically bring these low skill jobs back.
--- IDEA 2 - DECENTRALIZE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES (Move them out of Washington D.C.
The capital, Whitehouse, and some executive services would remain in D.C., but many of the key departments would be moved to different regions of the country.
For example:
-The Veterans Administration in Phoenix
-The IRS in Dallas
-Treasury Department in NYC
-FBI in SLC
-The EPA in Portland or Seattle
-Department of Agriculture in Iowa
and so forth. Federal government jobs move to other places around the country bringing it closer to the people so they get a more personal connection with the government since it actually supplies jobs to the people they know. It also moves these departments into locations that cost less than the high prices of the D.C. beltway.
Is there some loss of more interpersonal meetings between departments and cabinets? Sure, but high speed Internet access is readily available in ALL metropolitan areas around the country. We have video conferencing technology which eliminates the need for us to have the requirement of so many in-person meetings. It's a trade-off, but one that is greatly benefiting the people of the country.
And as the Federal government this is a big win because today, much of the sentiment is that the Federal government DOESN'T DO anything for me. It's a bunch of "elites" who waste time and money and the people don't see anything direct benefit.
Decentralizing the location of government agencies begins to eliminate this. Just like the US National Guard has a training camp just north of the city where I live, I can't say that the national guard doesn't do anything and isn't needed. They offer a great service and employ a lot of the people in my community, the surrounding communities. The national guard members, employees, and their families all buy homes in our communities raising home values (since these are stable jobs, homes aren't sold left and right, people stay, pay taxes, leading to general growth for our communities). These people also buy goods in our stores, contributing to the local economy. All because the Army put one of their national guard training camps here instead of concentrating them at West Point in New York.
I can't say those agencies are specifically "in touch" with citizens. I'd rather say, they might be more hellish if they were all centralized in Berlin.
The second idea is also a great idea from a strategic perspective. At the risk of sounding doomsdayish, by spreading the federal government's agency headquarters around the country, it minimizes the risk of a single city-wide or even state-wide catastrophe (sea level rise, nuclear carbomb, Giant Meteor delivering on its one campaign promise, etc.) eradicating the leadership of most/all federal agencies.
We (Norway) did just that a few years ago; mostly, it was a success once the dust settled.
For instance, the coastal administration moved from the capital Oslo to Ålesund which is smack in the middle of a world-renowned maritime cluster; fisheries agency. moved to our #2 city (or #1 if you ask the locals) Bergen, historically the major export hub for the coastal fisheries, etc.
The key benefit is that it ensures there is a need for highly skilled labour also outside the capital; also, as you mention, it provides for more closeness to government - the sectors affected by the whims of a government agency has said agency within spitting distance, which helps.
The only thing I would point out (see my comment a little further down about US budget) is that our current level of taxation supports comparable levels of spending to Nordic countries. I would guess, not doing an in depth analysis, that this is partly or even mostly due to the much larger relative size of the US GDP.
And in the case of healthcare, we are flat out spending more, both in real dollars and per capita measurements, and getting less. So I view tax arguments as more or less red herrings: We already spend as much or more, instead we should ask what is wrong with our system? Changes to our systems should not require increases in our taxation (necessarily).
But it's also why I really like your ideas since they are systemic in nature.
In New Zealand we have free public healthcare, education subsidies (though tertiary education is not free), and a top tax rate of 33%, while we still make most of our money from primary industries like beef, dairy and wood[1].
Public healthcare allows us to have a huge single buyer for our pharmaceuticals - Pharmac[2] - which brings a lot of power to negotiate good deals.
It might not be reasonable for the US to become like the Nordic countries, but things could certainly be better.
Things can be made better in a way that's consistent with American principles of merit and competition. That's what Trump represents -- a return to the pre-Bush style of government that put reasonable economic restrictions in place and tried to provide an even playing field for everyone without introducing artificial government dependence.
GHWB and Bill Clinton sold this country into servitude for the elite by allowing them to freely export their labor overseas where it costs less than a dollar per hour. GWB and Obama continued that. That's 28 years of policy that have seriously exacerbated the economic condition of the average American while the fat cats at the top have gotten ever-richer.
Trump wants to make sure American money is used to help and employ Americans. That's good! There's no reason that all the money has to go overseas.
"You've also got a top marginal personal income tax rate approaching 60% which is nearly twice that of the US and political suicide."
That's only true if you count Federal Income Taxes alone. By the time you're done with Social Security, Medicare, state and city taxes (esp in NY, CA), the top marginal tax rate here approaches 50%.
Everyone ignores this when talking about taxes. I had an accountant do the math for me out of curiosity if I were to move to the Netherlands - and my marginal tax rate would have increased a whopping 7%.
I would have saved more than that in health care related expenses, so it was more or less a wash with that included.
People that say the US is low taxed are simply not paying attention. I pay comparable "all in" taxes as my Canadian co-workers.
Nordic countries pay significantly more in taxes any way you look at it. You'd get laughed out of the room if you talked to someone like Donald Trump about paying a 40% marginal tax rate.
This talking point of once-sky-high marginal tax rates gets a lot of airplay, but it's very misleading. Almost no one paid those rates. Tax receipts as percentage of GDP have been remarkably stable over time:
> Tax receipts as percentage of GDP have been remarkably stable over time
That may be true, but since the sources you listed contradict each other, I'm left confused. I can find supporting evidence of the graph[1], but not of the wikipedia entry. The world bank apparently thinks they are all wrong[2]. Then there's a report that Norway is actually doing it with much less taxes than Denmark and Sweden[3], but that might be likely due to oil revenue. I'm left to conlcude that without a lot of research to look into the specifics, there's quite a few ways to measure this, and I'm not sure which are most relevant to the discussion at hand.
And isn't anymore. If you want to argue that it should be, I'll listen to that, but you can't just throw out a link to graph about tax rates 50+ years ago and think that settles it and the US can be just like Norway.
But it was, not not too long ago. 35 years ago it was 50%. 40 years ago it was 70%. Just saying it ignores the core of economic and tax policy in the US ignores, well... the the recent history of the economic and tax policy of the US. Rather than a rank dismissal of the idea, why not explain what's so different than now from then that makes it impossible?
> you can't just throw out a link to graph about tax rates 50+ years ago and think that settles it and the US can be just like Norway.
I didn't. I just meant to show that your reason for dismissing it seems poorly founded, or at least poorly explained.
70 decades ago, if I were a billionaire, I'd have no choice but to stay in the US and pay that tax rate. Europe is rebuilding from a war, Asia is an agrarian back-water and South America is about to start experimenting with Communism. Yeah, where am I going to run to, Mars?
Now it's different. I'll be laughing with my other billionaire buddies about your tax rate plans while snorting coke of a hooker's tits on my private yacht and watching the Monaco F1 GP from the harbor. I've got all the luxuries I need over there, and in fact, everywhere, that I previously could only enjoy in the US. I can talk with who I need to talk to over Skype, I can do my business, banking, everything, remotely.
It's not like other countries don't have equal or better infrastructure. It's not like I can get clean water and food only in the US that would somehow make this a magical place I'd never leave.
So why would I just sit quietly and let you tax me at 90%, exactly?
Except, jokes on you, you may still owe the US taxes even if you don't live there but you get income from there, and they expect you to fill out your worldwide income and file taxes if you're a US citizen.
> So why would I just sit quietly and let you tax me at 90%, exactly?
Extradition treaties and/or freezing of your bank accounts, businesses and resources within the US.
The largest portion of our budget is mandatory spending (~65%). Of our mandatory spending, the largest portion of that is spent on Social Services (Social security, medicare and health, etc) and yet we still have worse services than almost any other western country (IMO).
You start looking at percentages and an even more sinister picture starts to take shape:
> "Canada spends 6.3 percent of its total yearly budget on military spending. The United States spends 19.3 percent of its budget on military expenses. Mexico uses 3.3 percent of its budget for military spending."
> "Canada spends 17.9 percent of its total yearly budget on health care. The United States spends 19.3 percent of its budget on health care expenses. Mexico uses 11.8 percent of its budget for health care."
> "Norway spends 17.9 percent of its budget on health care spending, while its neighbor Sweden spends 13.8 percent of its budget on health care."
> "In France, health care spending is 16.7 percent of Frances yearly budget."
This article needs citation, but see this report that seems to at least tangentially support some of the trends voiced:
> "The United States is, by far, the country that spends the most on health as a share
of its economy (with 16.9% of its GDP allocated to health in 2012)"
So at this point we can conclude that the US spends roughly the same share, or more, of it's GDP on Health care as other countries...even those "socialist" ones...yet we have a much worse standard/level/cost of care.
Even at our "lower" tax rates our GDP is by far and away the largest:
But moreover, our PER CAPITA GDP is one of the highest in the world (higher than Norway and Sweden).
So at the end of the day, America:
* Spends more on healthcare in flat dollar terms than almost any other nation
* Spends more on healthcare PER CAPITA than almost any other nation
and yet we still have far worse levels of care.
So this problem has nothing to do with economic or tax policy in the US. The question is: Where is the enormous sums of money we are ALREADY pouring into the system going?
Most Western health systems are universal and more or less exclusively government-funded. This means that the entire population is in the same risk pool, reducing costs for the more vulnerable users and increasing the incentives to implement more preventative medical practices. As de facto monopolies, these systems can do a much better job of controlling the costs of salaries, equipment, and drugs. And, because the systems don't need to turn a profit, they can operate at cost.
Our private health care system, however, has a cycle of perverse incentives -- employers, insurers, patients, and doctors -- that leads to spiraling costs with no increased benefits. The populations with the highest health risks (i.e. costs) are shoved onto the public rolls, in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA. Meanwhile, the lowest-risk populations are forced to pay into private, for-profit insurance schemes. Specialists have outsized bargaining power, which leads to grossly outsized salaries. Equipment and drug manufacturers can play hospitals and systems off of each other to bid up prices. And, of course, shareholders want a return on their investment.
This problem has everything to do with economic and tax policy in the US.
I think the point I was trying to address was the implied claim that we "can't afford" health care systems akin to other western examples. Arguments like:
> "Your tax rate is so high America would never vote for a similar tax."
> "Percentage wise those countries spend a lot more on health care than the US."
I would agree that our private health care system has perverse incentives. Combined with the degree of separation between cost and consumer due to our insurance system, this has resulted in general market failure.
Neither of these are directly economic or tax policy related (IMO). We already are being taxed and paying for health care...the issue is where is our health system failing to deliver value-per-dollar spent. Which generally might involve some economic policy overlap as far as market regulation, but I don't think it is the whole (or even the majority) of the story.
Corruption, lack of a single payer system that dramatically increases efficiency in the "socialist" countries. Insane health insurance system (ties into corruption).
It's doubtful they can/will fix any of this.
America is a country controlled by lobbyists.
The politicians don't matter at the end of the day, look at Obama, had the right idea, could only implement a relatively mediocre system because anything good was politically untenable.
The fact that politics can trump (lol) the health of the nation is enough for me to never want to live there.
American healthcare is run by the private sector with pretty much zero accountability compared to say, the UK, where the NHS is for the most part, a public organisation with open books.
> ...industry supplies the bulk of the funds devoted to research and development, the public sector—primarily the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—supports most of the nation’s basic biomedical research.
I wonder what would happen if the U.S. passed a law requiring that drug prices in the U.S. be no higher than anywhere else in the world. That is the drug company is free to set any price, but they cannot sell at a lower price outside the U.S.
Wouldn't it be dramatically easier to just allow Americans to buy their drugs from other first world countries at the prices they pay? If American drug companies have to compete with extra-national pricing, I'm guessing they'll figure out a way to.
On top of that, you're not forcing anybody to do anything.
No I mean specifically from the private sector. You have to front that cost somehow. Whether you're seeing the cost as more expensive drugs or whatever, you're still paying it. R&D is factored into the cost.
The negotiation process is just different than when other countries are negotiating with US pharmaceutical companies.
>So this problem has nothing to do with economic or tax policy in the US. The question is: Where is the enormous sums of money we are ALREADY pouring into the system going?
The pockets of the oligarchy represented by Clinton and Trump.
We could anyway imo. Our "very core" of economic and tax policy is actually pretty flexible. Just look at how the markets have developed over the last several decades. Yes there will be pain, but I'd trade a little short-term pain with long-term benefit over short-term relief with long-term decline anyday.
Not to say Scandinavia has the best of everything, but regardless... Jag skulle vilja bo i skandinavien istället USA
Take the other example of Belgium whose tax level is more or less equivalent but is scaling down on basically everything. People there complain that they pay a lot now, but are almost certain that when their turn come, they will not get anything.
We are in a context where you can't predict the outcome of the next election a single day before, who will trust to current generation of politician with policies in 30 years ?
Also, that's not just a question of egoism. I don't mind paying today so that people get unemployment benefit and a good pension. The problem is that if it goes the other way when I reach retirement age, I will neither receive the pension nor the year of tax cut to make up for it.
Whenever someone tells me about the "nordic blessings" I tell them to "junte" the "law" up.
Smaller, more homogenic countries compare badly to more populated heterogenic ones.
Also: norway's oil example holds up since the once poorer than Swedes Norse outperformed the Swedes because of this. 1-2 generations earlier, "nordicly blessed" Norse were the house maids and guest workers for the Swedes. Nowadays it's Swedish students doing Norway's dishes.
Also Sweden maybe high rated in terms of social mobility, but only until the highest income percentiles are reached. Above that it's way way harder to reach compared to other first world countries. So while you can climb up more easily than normal the social latter, it's steps mean less than normal and you'll almost never make it into Sweden's 1%. A category that is the most open in the US of A.
Of course not easy. But doable compared to Sweden. You have to look at the statistics. The top Swedish percentile is made up more than normal of inherited wealth (48% in Sweden, 12% in the US). The US doesn't have a Wallenberg family that owns 42% of the country's stocks.
Of course you're right, but it doesn't mean anything.
It's like saying that you should buy people lottery tickets instead of healthcare.
I once heard that the US citizens most vehemently against raising taxes for the rich were the homeless, because they didn't want THEIR taxes raised once THEY became rich.
Yes, BUT these small countries do not pay the heavy Global Police tax to keep the world safe for example from Terrorism..we DO! Thus its not the same thing fits both small and big countries..
The US causes terrorism by steam rolling third world countries, but more or less has to do it now since these third world countries already hate the US enough to require this kind of policing.
Once the population is "well educated" they will start to ask intelligent questions which will then prevent them for voting for someone like Trump (or most republicans in general).
So it's in his/their best interest to keep them uneducated.
If people are so generous over there, why the need to put that burden to government and instead make funds so people can use what they need, and if a fund goes into corrupt hands you can always create a new one and vote with your wallet.
> Norway generates more revenue with oil than the entires US of A, for 5 million people
I find this hard to believe. The US generates what looks to be close to 5x the barrels of oil per year as Norway, and since oil is globally prices, that should lead to approximately 5x the revenue. It will obviously be less per-capita, but that's not what you said.
> and is third worldwide exporter for Natural Gas just behind Qatar and Russia
Your facts are also slanted here. The US is the worlds largest natural gas producer[2], at over 6x the production of Norway, and 25% more than the second place, which is Russia.
That said, it's not like the US is a poor country, or doesn't have credit available to finance anything it wants. Training jobless workers would be a net benefit to the economy after a few years, and would pay itself off. We could easily finance that if we decided to. It's a matter of will, not capability.
You are mixing up production and export.
US produces more Oil and natural gas, but is low on exports.
Norway on the other hand has a low domestic consumption (because of a low population) and is able to generate more revenue on exports.
Because for this argument they are irrelevant. Domestic consumption is money you aren't spending to buy gas on the market, at market prices. If Norway had a use for 100% of it's oil, it would be saving the equivalent amount from the global market as it would be gaining in revenue.
The bigger difference is that one is state owned, and the other is mostly privatized. Then again, for the larger picture, this is only relevant if the countries in question are constrained to the income available from this system. Neither are. If the US wanted to issue a few hundred billion in bonds, they could do so with little trouble if it was politically feasible. Or they could literally just make the money out of thin air, if they weren't concerned with or were willing to accept the possible inflation.
It's hard to overstate just how much economic and monetary power the US can bring to bear.
> US produces more Oil and natural gas, but is low on exports.
For now, the US are exporting more natural gas than Norway. However, with the completion of Cheniere's project at Sabine pass, this will be the opposite [1]. Actually, this November, the US are going to export more than twice the volume of Norway.
> USA does not have an oil fund that amounts do $150k per capita to pay for "free everything" (university education, universal health care, childcare)
The US federal government pays more per capita for health care than Norway, for one! The fact the US manages to pay so much per capita for healthcare and not have universal health care is actually quite an achievement.
So Nordic patients are paying less for the same treatments, and/or getting less aggressive care. (I don't know which or how much of both)
To the extent Norway pays less for the same drugs/treatments, they are funding a smaller share of the profits of biotech & pharmaceutical companies.
The US pays a significantly higher share of pharma/biotech profits than any other country (citation needed). We therefore contribute the most to the new research, new drugs and treatments developed by those same firms. I actually think this is one of the greatest things we do as a country.
Some people call this "overpaying" but I think of it differently.
Even if this is true, it's a horrible way to fund the companies. If we want the US to fund drug companies, we sould do it through some sort of progressive tax, not through a raised cost in base level care, which affects everyone, and when it gets high enough effectively means poor people can't pay, and the middle class feels it as a large burden.
$3000 or more a year in healthcare costs is not felt the same by someone that makes $50k a year as someone who makes $150k a year. And that's for an individual. Many people are trying to cover a whole family at these rates.
But that's not how people actually pay for care... Insurance cost, copays, and deductibles are all set based on household income. In Medicaid Expansion states, if you make less than FPL and you pay literally nothing - it's the best insurance money can't buy. As you make more the subsidies taper off and you pay more in premiums and more in OOP costs. The cost is absolutely socialized through progressive taxation.
On the supply side, the price of care is set roughly in the market's ability to compete, but the price is absolutely back stopped by government policies like patents and Medicare reimbursement rates.
Take an inside look at how these firms bring new treatments to market and you know it's intensely competitive. The level of investment is commensurate to the potential payoff.
> Insurance cost, copays, and deductibles are all set based on household income.
Isn't it more accurate to say discounts to these are all set based on household income? At a certain point, you're paying regular plan costs. All this amounts to is a separate way to tax people for the costs, which means it can use a different schedule than the regular tax code. If the US is funding these companies, there should be a better way to do so that the craziness that is this.
> Take an inside look at how these firms bring new treatments to market and you know it's intensely competitive. The level of investment is commensurate to the potential payoff.
I've yet to be convinced that the massive cost of R&D due to trials and marketing which needs to be recouped by massive prices isn't at least in part the result of a runaway feedback loop. We require lots of testing to protect the populace which necessitates a lot of money to develop the drugs which means that if it's a dud or has negative effects it's in the interest of the company to occasionally cover that up because it cost so much which leads to drugs on the market that cause problems which leads to more stringent testing which leads to increased cost which leads to increased need for success which leads to....
We need to drastically decrease the cost of trials while making the cost of taking a bad drug to the general market more. That's a tall order, but it's what's needed.
This is one of those situations where we want the market to solve it, but we probably aren't prepared for what a totally unencumbered market response would be. We've likely over (or at least poorly) regulated drug development, and since most things are cyclical, it will probably swing the other way at some point. That's probably good, as long as it doesn't swing too far. I want a more efficient system, but not necessarily at the expense of a few million casualties from cascading mistakes.
Unfortunately, since it has to do with people being hurt, or the possibility of people being hurt, I think it's unlikely we'll get legislation or a majority of politicians that are willing to look at it rationally. It's too easy to drum up emotional support for some aspect or another for personal gain.
It's the price of having to wait months in order to see a doctor I guess. That is if government thinks you are worth treating and you don't have to resort to medical tourism.
Höpö-höpö. The rest of the Nordic block - Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland - doesn't have oil, and we all have very similar policies that Norway has.
It doesn't fully protect us from effects of globalization and we have similar situation with the population in rural areas and small old industrial towns not doing that well and turning against immigrants because of that.
But it seems that the situation is much worse in the US.
When an immigrant or anyone your tribe doesn't particularly care for comes along and is willing to do the same work for less, it breeds resentment. Unfortunately, that's human nature.
The U.S. has had to deal with this problem on a greater scale compared to countries that grew over millennia because of a liberal immigration policy and economic freedoms afforded to immigrants, and the aftermath of slavery. It's remarkable that this experiment has worked as well as it has (thank you, geography). But the ruling class dropped the ball over the last 20 years and ignored the rapid increase of those marginalized by immigration & trade side-effects, even though there still is a widely-held regard for the "melting pot", so now we got Trump.
It's worth noting that the current wave of immigrants is by no means the first to be marginalized, either. Irish immigrants in the 1800's, for example, faced very overt persecution for many of the same reasons (notably: "stealing" the jobs of non-immigrants), especially at the height of emigration from Ireland due to the Great Famine.
In the long run, we'll likely look back at all this fuss as another chapter in our history books, but I'm sure there'll be some other ethnic group immigrating in droves. The melting pot is a continual process. Slow and frustrating sometimes, but it works for the better in the long-term.
Out of curiosity, what's the proportion of rural or small-town population v. urban population in those countries? I find that tends to be the big dividing line here in the US, and am curious as to whether or not the same can be said elsewhere (i.e. if a lower rural:urban population ratio correlates with a higher probability for Nordic-style policy).
It's probably not the only variable at play here (economic development and education levels could be additional factors), but it might be influencing those variables in subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways.
your whole nordic block has a population of 26.6 million. That's similar to Texas, not the us. in other words, what is applicable to those places may not translate to such a big country. if you start expanding it to be similar in size to the US, you'd need to take very problematic areas in, like Russia. similarly it can be noted that northern places in the us tend to have lower income inequalities in general (northernmost state, alaska ranks second within us, northernmost country, iceland ranks first within europe). nearly all states that border canada do well on poverty measures (the exception being new york).
Perhaps he is, I've no idea. I, however, do live in Denmark and am able to point out that we get all that. Hell, if I spend money on health in Europe I get it returned by the state when I come back.
Does my being physically present at some point on this planet make the original argument any more or less valid?
Sure, we have many problems but actually getting good benefits and seeing our taxes put to use at our isn't one of them.
That's probably the one thing I actually agree with Trump on: when he said the whole "NATO, we have to talk" comments. We're all living under the US umbrella when it comes to defense and it's pathetic that we don't fulfil the terms of the agreement we made.
Hell, most of these kinds of policies were enacted on the outset of WWII, not exactly a time of greatness and plenty. For an other example, the UK enacted the NHS just a few years after the war ended.
You're being glib with the term 'immigrant'. He was an upper middle class professional who moved to the west in order to obtain health treatment for his kid that was unavailable in iraq.
That's utter nonsense. I live in Canada, and there is no way someone like Trump could be elected here. The message simply wouldn't resonate. Harper was considered extreme and he was left of Hilary.
You know what goes a long way to eliminating blue collar angst? Healthcare. There's a policy that the US would have no issue implementing if the will existed. Hell it would be cheaper than what you currently spend.
You know another policy that would help? Subsidized maternity leaves.
Do you want a third? A government run pension program.
A forth? Controlled college tuition.
All of these are well within the US's power to implement, provided the will is there. But the will not being there has nothing to do with the ability of a nation to implement these things.
Yeah buddy, I don't know where you live, but I grew up in northern Manitoba, lived in Winnipeg, and in other parts of rural southern Manitoba. I have family throughout Alberta and Saskatchewan, and on the east coast. They have been following, promoting and loving Trumps message. If you don't think Trumps message resonated with blue collar folks in Canada, you better break out your filter bubble and take a look around, and think about what you want the political landscape of the country to look like after the next election.
The difference is that the U.S. is a heavily rural country, whereas Canada is the second most urbanized country in the world. Our hinterland is not sufficiently populous to elect a Trump-like figure.
A lot of QC is made of run down blue collar workers who are on hard economic times, and somewhat xenophobic. I'm wouldn't be so quick to say Trumps policy would fail here.
The problem for them though is that they are also French, so things like the ADQ are tied to the inevitable "we'd be better on our own" and don't ever leave the province.
Well, Europe isn't Canada, and 1933 isn't 2016. One of the major differences between Canada and any other country on the planet is the level of multiculturalism that is not only supported, but encouraged. It keeps all sorts of extremism at bay. I'm personally think it goes too far, but I have to concede that this is a benefit.
That comment however wasn't that someone like Trump could never be elected here, it's that the current environment, along with that of the foreseeable future, would have to change dramatically for it to be the case.
You're right, but not for the reasons you think. What's keeping xenophobia at bay is not multiculturalism but a reasonably strong economy and social safety net. If these start to fail you will see the xenophobia ramp up as people look for someone to blame for their misery.
I recently visited my family in Alberta where many are struggling due to the crash in oil prices and xenophobia is definitely on the rise. Pretending that "it can't happen" is exactly what allows it to happen.
Do you think that most Germans are, at their core, antisemitic? I don't think they are, but the economic conditions of a 1933 Germany made it easy for many people to blame a specific "other" for their situation with devastating results.
The rise of the demagogues is a known core bug of the system called democracy, and what triggers it is fear and anger without a clear, objective, immediately identifiable cause.
If the cause is clear and straightforward (invasion by a foreign army), then fear strengthens society, and the whole system responds effectively with unity and determination.
If fear and anger exist, but the cause is complex and remote (globalization, automation, progress), and seems beyond the grasp of the everyman, then the masses turn to demagogues for "help", and are invariably wrong. That's what happened in the '30s. This is what is happening now - hopefully not with the same end result.
but a reasonably strong economy and social safety net.
Which was exactly what I said in my first comment.
You're correct, but then again we have some built in safeguards that mitigate these events. One of them being FPTP, which is why I'm personally in no great rush to get rid of it.
It's harder to find groups to rally against when many of those groups are part of the general populace. The more diverse the culture, the less likely it is to be xenophobic when times get tough. That's why major population centres in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal voted Trudeau last time around - the Conservative message that leaned towards "dealing with" Muslims was utterly rejected.
"It can't happen _here_.
It can't happen _here_.
I'm telling you my dear, that it can't happen _here_...
Who could imagine that they would freak out somewhere in Wisconsin?
Who could imagine that they would freak out in Michigan?
Who could imagine that they would freak out in Washington DC?
Who could imagine?..."
Um, the US has been completely divided right down the middle since Bill Clinton was in office.
Not only is all of that possible to imagine, it should be almost expected. Canada is a completely different beast, with a completely different governmental structure.
Heh, but the propaganda machine is working as intended and those who pay for it have made sure at least half of the American population think government run healthcare, pensions and anything else is close to pure fucking evil. You do it on your own or you're not a proper American. Amazing, really.
What about him? He's not only dead, he never went beyond Mayor. Mayors are notoriously loony because only special interest groups vote in municipal elections.
I seriously doubt that /everyone/ would be on the 'free everything' plans. Just like right now not /everyone/ is in jail (but those that are still cost us QUITE a bit both in jail fees and in public court fees of various kinds).
Wouldn't a social safety net to prevent destroyed families, to prevent crimes driven by desperation and/or drug abuse, and to fund the enrichment of workers in to higher skill cogs in the machine that is society be a wiser investment than in more police, prosecutors and jails?
USA has plenty of money for its military its bases abroad and its wars. Maybe that money could be put at good use and USA should stop thinking it's so exceptional. Let USA concentrate on domestic policies instead of the middle east.
It's a question of priorities. It's easy to get into a war thinking it'll be short and easy then once you're in it's poisonous politically to not fund the war because it gets spun as not supporting the troops. Then it's hard to pull out of place like Iraq even if you don't want to keep funding the war because now it'll just become an broiling pot of lawless extremism because it's hard to rebuild a state and impose outside political systems at the same time.
Also a lot of the larger bases like those in Japan and South Korea are partially paid for by the countries there as part of getting US troops for defense.
Yet we do have the funds to pay for perpetual war in the Middle East and the military industrial complex? The money we spent on the Iraq war alone would have paid for years of free college.
The issues of worker dissatisfaction in the U.S. is very similar to the ones in China, which was ironically built on economic equality.China, like Sweden and Norway, is ethnically homogeneous, but unlike Scandinavia its population is quite large. The larger the population, the more difficult it is to administer equal access to economic prosperity. China's revenues are technically built on capitalist models to maximize productivity, and it uses socialist ideals to do what it can with wealth redistribution, and yet is failing miserably. Socialism falls apart when the population far exceeds its ability to manage monetary policy. The U.S. is in a similar quandary without the socialist infrastructure; if China cannot do it, what are the chances the U.S. can?
The U.S. must innovate a different approach built to scale and support a population of 1 billion people. It's like management 101: managing a workforce of 20 to prosperity is much different than managing a workforce of 10,000.
> You can do what the democrats have talked about, which we have successfully done in Nordic countries which is to spend a lot of money on re-educating the workforce and making sure those at the bottom get decent skills.
One of the issues with this is that while yes, you can get the people to become more skilled/educated, ultimately the jobs that take advantage of that skills and education are in cities, not in small towns or rural areas where so many of these people currently live. And that's probably not gonna change.
Now, you could say, "well that's fine, we can give them moving stipends or something" but a lot of people are reluctant to leave what they've known as homes for so long. Such a strategy essentially puts these areas into hospice mode. That's an uncomfortable thought for probably most Americans.
And moving public sector jobs, while it might work, is probably politically untenable in America; the areas that are dying are the same ones that are generally hostile to government.
"One of the issues with this is that while yes, you can get the people to become more skilled/educated, ultimately the jobs that take advantage of that skills and education are in cities, not in small towns or rural areas where so many of these people currently live."
Somehow, our companies have become experts at enabling remote working 12 time zones away, but can't manage to pull off the same thing for someone in the rural US.
> Somehow, our companies have become experts at enabling remote working 12 time zones away
Debatable. Most companies don't really have that many individual remote workers. Yes, they may have geographically distinct offices, but that's different.
I honestly have always been a pro "total free trade" with even the notion of protective tariffs being totally dismiss-able...but I think it's time to look at things with more of a nuanced approach.
When it comes to jobs, there is significant value provided to society as a whole from jobs that do not require a high degree of workforce re-education. Sometimes, people need a job that they can comfortably walk into and walk out of while they are between jobs. Walmart and McDonald's are the places providing that type of think because jobs that could be done cheaper elsewhere while importing the product were shipped off.
What we are seeing is that by offloading "no training" jobs to other cheaper countries and retaining "heavy education" jobs here in the US we're creating an additional cost to work that now REQUIRES paying for school, investing time in learning a skill and then hoping the market for that skill remains viable so you don't have to then re-invest in a new skill later on in life.
It makes me sincerely wonder if certain tariffs are more justified just to protect that type of work because it seems that the cost of not having it available is far higher than most people have accounted for. I live in the south east, an area that was highly dependent on the textile economy before it went belly up with the removal of protective tariffs. The effect was fairly devastating and it took many years to recover. Some areas never did while others flourished.
Just makes me want to understand all the factors more.
This is all right on, but I would add one important point. Which is that some people cannot be retrained. It's the rare fifty year old who can adapt to a whole new field, learn all the theory and practice all the application, and then successfully compete against people half his age to land those entry-level jobs.
If our economic system puts people in such a position through no fault of their own and they cannot escape it despite their best efforts, they need to be taken care of, for life if need be.
There's another thread on HN right now where it is being taken as a given that OUR OWN PARENTS cannot be expected to use a computer without breaking it (filling it with malware, etc.)
I find that premise debatable, but if it is true, then how can they be retrained for technical jobs?
We just don't have a system like that. I grew up in Appalachia the county next to mine has yet to get cell phones or the internet. There is no viable economic activity their and everyone who could has left. Those that stay cling to the idea that coal will create jobs again.
We don't even have a basic agreement on how and what kids should be taught, and since we don't have public healthcare or social insurance for all its a big risk to move in order to search for better economic activity.
>> spend a lot of money on re-educating the workforce and making sure those at the bottom get decent skills.
It is the height of snobbery to move the lesser skilled jobs out of the country and tell everyone they need to be smarter. There will always be a distribution of skills and it is not for the well educated to say "you just need to be like us". All the US needs to do is stop signing 900 page "free trade" agreements and start adjusting import taxes to bring manufacturing back. Call it what you will, but taking care of your own first is not a bad thing.
>There will always be a distribution of skills and it is not for the well educated to say "you just need to be like us".
This is akin to saying, "It's not for the doctor to tell you how to live your life." True enough; but you ignore their advice at your own peril.
That an education is a path to economic stability and mobility is not a matter of opinion. To write this off as snobbery is shooting the messenger.
There will always be a distribution of skills. And that distribution of skills required by the market needs to match the education of the populace. "Smart" is a superlative; "educated in a particular field" is merely an attribute.
Manufacturing is not coming back. We need to move on, and soon.
The real problem is these jobs are never coming back. Why is Wal-Mart the biggest company in the USA? Because the American public wants cheap crap. That's it. No matter what folks say they will pay $2 less for something from China vs. a more expensive product made in the USA.
Until you can convince Americans as a whole that they will have to pay more for goods made in the USA to employ Americans, jobs which were once done in the USA but are now cheaper to be done overseas will never see a return. Trade wars or import taxes won't fix that it will only exacerbate the problem.
It can come back.... by having a trade war with China, by raising the tax on Chinese Imports. I lived in China, a pair of Levis made by factory down a block is 100 bucks(and chinese make way less monthly), but when it export to USA, its 60 a pair.
What happens when tariff is raised and a pair of Levis from China now have to sell 120 bucks a pair? and if you produce that in US, since you dont have tariff, its 60 bucks a pair? what you think factory is going to do?
Trade wars are a horrible idea, won't work and will just harm the overall economy. Nearly every economist agrees that free trade is a net gain for everyone involved. Moving to something like a trade war which defies all rational economic sense is a terrible idea and I hope Trump is not dumb enough to do something that drastic.
every economist also said market was going to crash yesterday. Free trade is a horrible idea, specially when your trade partner dont play on the same rule you play on.
One of the reasons those jeans are $60 is because the labor is cheap. Import tariffs might bring back jobs, but no way you'll be able to pay the workers the wage they're looking for and keep the cost of goods the same.
My question is if the cost of goods will rise enough to make wage gains irrelevant, or if the effect won't be strong enough and we'll see real wage gains.
you didnt see my point, Chinese put heavy tariff on the import to protect their local economy. therefore a pair of jeans thats created locally going to sell more expensive then it is oversea.
when you have a 100 bucks a pair Levis vs 5 bucks a pair of local made jean (which came out of same factory), Chinese are most likely to buy the 5 bucks one, and therefore Chinese govt effectively protect their local business, took job from USA and helped every local economy with American investing dollars.
What makes you think these jobs will ever come back in significant numbers? Even if the companies were forced to come back from overseas there would probably be a significantly smaller labor force because of automation. This problem is only going to get worse so it makes sense to go to a solution that is long term.
So every country should manufacture all their own stuff? Why does that make any sense?
And what happens to the cost of goods once everything is manufactured in the US, paying workers a living wage? In increase in the price of all products hurts the poorer and middle classes the most.
And what happens when more and more automation takes over? Then all the import tariffs in the world will be of no help to the welders and sewers you chose to let stagnate instead of improving their access to education and training.
Education and training for what? This is the question people like you never answer. Welders are already trained--for welding. What are they supposed to do now? Retail sales? You can't support a family on that. And what do you do when the checkout clerks and other low-end jobs get automated away? What are you going to retrain these people for?
"Our government offers free university education, so even less well off blue collar families could send their kids to good schools."
Here in the US, we actually have a decent Community College system which, while not free, tend to be very reasonably priced. Obama proposed leveraging this system as a low cost option for people who don't want to run up massive education debt.
I can't find it on Google, but there was a famous political quote around the 1988 election: "Every time a Democrat mentions retraining, they lose another 100,000 votes."
The USA lost 2 million industrial jobs during the 1980s. It was, at the time, the worst decade for deindustrialization. The Democrats felt the answer was retraining. The Republican reply amounted to the assertion that the USA needed a strong dollar.
And the Republicans won re-election in 1988.
From this, the Democrats learned that they would be punished for mentioning retraining. So it lost ground as an idea in USA politics.
The problem stemmed to policies that started back in the 70's, which kept getting expanded, which allowed for cheaper imports. This of course had the US companies jumped on, since hell, those people over seas work for 2 cents a day vs my skilled employees that turn out a quality product want $50K a year!
Yes it can. According to Wikipedia, Sweden has lower economic inequality than Norway does. [0] And the percentage of income held by the poorest 10% is nearly the same across Nordic countries. [1]
I have quite a few friends from the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland) and they are quick to tell you that things aren't perfect there, but I think you can say that government policies can create a more equal society even in countries without petromoney (e.g. Sweden).
The key complaint many will have against the various progressive policies in Scandinavia when applied to the US is not the petromoney but the reality of a more homogeneous and educated citizenry.
Despite AWS' claims otherwise, you can't just extend a service designed for 10 million to 320 million and expect even remotely the same performance.
The Nordic model we know today was developed and implemented in the 1970s.
Obviously this kind of transformation takes time, and I have heard from Finnish friends that the education system quality is falling (it used to be within top-3 in the world for test scores, now they're only top-10).
I'm sure when people thought of the model in the '70s, there were many people saying it would never work for a country of 5 million people, but 40 years later it still mostly works.
> Despite AWS' claims otherwise, you can't just extend a service designed for 10 million to 320 million and expect even remotely the same performance.
Are you saying the cost is too high, or it is simply infeasible to improve the lives of this many people?
For the improvement of quality of life, see India's current efforts. Which I would argue are even more ambitious (e.g. bring water and electricity to nearly half a billion people) and, while not perfect, are going about as well as anticipated.
For the financial argument, well there's a reason why everything in the Nordic countries is very expensive and people complain about the high taxes.
>Are you saying the cost is too high, or it is simply infeasible to improve the lives of this many people?
I'm saying a system designed for 10 million users cannot simply be extended to 320 million, particularly when that larger population is substantially more diverse.
Consider a social science study looking at the same populations. Would you really expect any given finding in the Scandinavian populations to map to the US?
Implement policies in the State level then? Wasn't that the original idea of United States of A?
Only 10 of your States has more people than Sweden.
Roughly 20 states has a population more than 5.5 million, which is the ballpark where Denmark, Finland and Norway are. So 30 States have less population than a typical Nordic country.
Sweden is likely more diverse than at least 15-20 of your states - a bit hard to compare due to different kind of demography statistics.
And we have free movement of workforce in EU/Schengen, so that ain't too different from US.
Democrats don't want to let individual states decide for themselves (Republicans for the most part don't want to either). They want national control over as much as they can get.
That is a political problem - totally different (and fixable if people want) than claimed issue that the Nordic model couldn't work in the US because difference in the size of population
That's part of it. The other part is that people are in favor of local control, even down to the most local level--until the local government and/or local voters (especially if it's their government and/or local voters) do something that they strongly disagree with.
>Implement policies in the State level then? Wasn't that the original idea of United States of A?
Yes, it was. That's why they had a confederation, not a union, organized under the Articles of Confederation. It was an abject failure. Nothing was able to get done because the states couldn't agree on anything, and the central government wasn't powerful enough to force them to do anything.
That's why the Constitution was invented instead.
It's a bit similar to the EU: the central government is too weak to force the members to adhere to its policies, so it's falling apart.
The Finnish government is cutting the education budget pretty heavily (especially higher education). I would still say that the fall in education rankings during the past years is more due to many Asian countries getting better and better instead of Finland getting worse.
Ok, lets assume that the benefits of economies of scale don't apply here and take that it doesn't work for systems with hundreds of millions of people as a premise.
We know it works for systems of up to ~50m people because those are the larger EU countries. In that case I submit that it would also work at state level in the US. I feel that you can't even make a good argument that the reason it can't work at state level is because of the federal government because we're also a de facto federation within the EU and it works for the most part.
edit: I'm likely missing or wildly underestimating something here but I just can't shake the impression that what prevents the US from having all the nice things we get are cultural and historical issues, not economical ones.
The biggest obstacle that prevents humans from doing anything is their own culture. Resources can be found if there is a will.
Here is no different. Many people hate the very concept of public education, let alone throwing more money at it. And when people do agree that we should do it, they inevitably disagree on the hows and the whats.
The issue with scale isn't logistical or so... metric based. It is as simple (and insurmountable) as getting such a diverse population to agree at all.
You don't deserve the downvotes. This is one of the main reasons, if the not the main reason that this kind of economics is hard. You can't, in general, take the institutions from one place, apply them to another and expect the same result -- or even similar results.
Our government offers free university education, so even less well off blue collar families could send their kids to good schools. And when economic times got harder it never hit blue collar works as hard as in America because we have free universal health care, heavily subsidized childcare, good pensions for everybody.
Does your system contain costs on these benefits better than the US, or do you have the inflation and pay it with tax increases? In the US all the benefits you mentioned have painful inflation. How does the government keep up with the costs?
In the US much of this is supplied by the market, which seeks to increase its profits every year to provide value for stockholders. The government, having no need to profit, is able to provide services to its citizens much more affordably.
Trump is for cutting taxes and spending, so how would he re-educate the workforce and make sure they get decent skills? His party is the same, they don't want to help anybody except the rich and profitable corporations who fund their campaigns, and want you to just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work harder.
The Republicans were part of Congress' gleeful global corporate sell-out, and support international corporations getting more tax cuts and handing out jobs to the cheapest people in other countries even more than the Democrats do; the only things both parties can agree on are more war and more money to the rich and corporations at the expense of the worker.
The problem is we are thinking about it the wrong way, with all this advances in technologies, who said everyone should work? everyone in the society should benefit from advancement in technology not only %0.001 of population.
why Zuckerberg should have this many billions, did he contributed 1,000,000 times more than a 1000th Facebook employee to the society?
problem is with Tax system and how US spends it's budget. money comes out of people's pocket and goes to corporations bank accounts.
for example with only $16B we can give shelter to all the homeless in this country. $16B is peanut compare to federal budget. it is a shame to have half a million homeless in the richest country in the word.
The Nordic countries have as much problems with right-wing populists as any other country. Not having a job is not the problem. Or at least: having a job does not stop them from voting for right-wing populists.
I would not consider the Nordic re-education system successful. Cynically speaking, it's designed to strike the unemployed from official counts, and the unemployment rate still ends up being higher than in the US. (Sweden 7.8%, US 4.9%)
I grew up in a rustbelt like industrial town in Norway. We has shipyards, glass factory, paper mill, textile industry, lock systems etc. Almost all of it got closed down and moved overseas as I grew up.
But we never ended up in the deep pit blue collar America ended up in, because government took a very active stance early to fight this with active policies. In towns where factories died, they moved public sector jobs from the capital.
People got a lot of retraining for new jobs. There is a strong system for vocational training in technical jobs like Germany so people could get skills for more advance jobs which was easier to keep when competing against asian industrial giants.
Our government offers free university education, so even less well off blue collar families could send their kids to good schools. And when economic times got harder it never hit blue collar works as hard as in America because we have free universal health care, heavily subsidized childcare, good pensions for everybody.
Basically the welfare system we built up saved our blue collar workers. Yet Americans pretend that there is no solution to this problem except attacking minorities, Mexico, China etc.
It is rich people like Trump and their agenda, which has made sure that blue collar workers in America have felt the influence of globalization harder than many other blue collar workers in the west.