Tag Archives: Socialism

Polemics

Are Nordic countries succeeding with socialism like Bernie Sanders says?

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Individials pay extremely high income taxes in Nordic countries
Individials pay extremely high income taxes in Nordic countries

Last week, I saw back to back studies on Nordic countries reported by the far-left UK Independent and Barron’s magazine. We’re probably going to hear more about how great socialism is from socialists, and since they seem to point to Nordic countries as proof, we should probably look at the studies and see what the truth is.

Let’s start with the report from Barron’s. You’ll have heard of Barron’s if you’re an investor.

It says:

Although there are areas—especially in taxes and labor market regulation—where socialist elements still exist in the Nordics, the region is by no means socialist today. In fact, according to the Heritage Foundation’s index of economic freedom, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark rank among the 30 most capitalist countries in the world.

These countries used to be socialist in the 1970s and 1980s. Socialism means a huge government work force, high taxes, massive regulation of private sector businesses, and massive spending on welfare programs. You didn’t have to marry before having children, the government would give you welfare. You didn’t have to take care of yourself, the government would give you free health care. You didn’t have to save for retirement, the government would give you a pension.

The article mentions one country in particular – Sweden. And here is what socialism looked like in Sweden:

In 1960, for every 100 “market-financed” Swedes (i.e. those who derived their income predominantly from private enterprise), there were 38 who were “tax-financed” (i.e. dependent on the public sector for their income, whether as civil servants or as recipients of payments from the state). Thirty years later, that number had risen to 151—in other words, there were significantly more people living off of the state than paying into the system. This reflects Sweden’s move away from a capitalist free-market economy to a socialist model.

When people talk about socialism, they mean more people living off the state than paying into the system.

But socialism can’t last forever. Eventually, the people in the private sector realize that they are keeping less and less of what they earn, and they stop working, or just leave. The article notes that IKEA, which started out in Sweden, moved out to avoid paying the 57% corporate tax rate.

Eventually, and this is the part that Bernie Sanders is ignorant about, Sweden slashed or eliminated taxes across the board, then cut their government spending on welfare, subsidies and gv:

A major tax reform in 1990/91 slashed corporate taxes from 57% to 30%. Income from shares was exempted from taxation, while capital gains from shares were taxed at only 12.5%.

The top marginal income-tax rate was set at around 50%, a reduction by 24 to 27 percentage points for the majority of the workforce. The proportion of earners taxed at a marginal rate of over 50% dropped from over half to only 17% paying income tax to the central government.

The reforms continued over the following years: in 2004, the estate tax of up to 30% was scrapped. Today, there is no estate tax in Sweden. The abolition of the wealth tax, which had already been cut, came into effect retroactively as of 1 January 2007. The corporate tax rate continued to decline, getting cut from 30% to 26.3% in 2009 and to 22% in 2013. Property tax rates were also cut substantially.

Between 1993 and 2000, social spending dropped from 22.2% to 16.9% of GDP, economic subsidies from 8.7% to 1.8% and public-sector payroll costs from 18.2% to 15.6%.

Sweden might be a little further ahead of some of the other Nordic countries. Over in Finland, they are still climbing out of it, and the massive government spending is so hard for socialists to cut.

Here’s a story from Finland about their government-run health care system – the same kind that Bernie is always bragging about, and telling us how well it works in Finland.

Far-left Reuters reports:

Finland’s coalition government resigned on Friday a month ahead of a general election, saying it could not deliver on a healthcare reform package that is widely seen as crucial to securing long-term government finances.

Healthcare systems across much of the developed world have come under increasing stress in recent years as treatment costs soar and people live longer, meaning fewer workers are supporting more pensioners.

Nordic countries, where comprehensive welfare is the cornerstone of the social model, have been among the most affected. But reform has been controversial and, in Finland, plans to cut costs and boost efficiency have stalled for years.

The very health care systems that Bernie lectures American voters about are all in decline and failing:

Other Nordic countries have also grappled with the need to cut costs. Sweden is to gradually raise its retirement age and has opened up parts of the healthcare system to the private sector in a bid to boost efficiency.

Denmark will gradually increase the retirement age to 73 – the highest in the world – while cutting taxes and unemployment benefits to encourage people to work more.

If you learned anything from this article, I’d like you to do me a favor. Please share and/or tweet this post, or share and/or tweet the posts from Barron’s and Reuters. We have an election coming up in 2020, and right now, the people are being lied to by foolish socialist politicians who talk and talk about things they have no knowledge about. We need to correct the views of the American people with facts. We can’t make the mistake of electing Democrats who are terrible at health care, and only good at making promises to spending taxpayer money. They have no idea how economics actually works in the real world, and we need to do everything we can to keep them out of power.

 

News

Will paying teachers more money improve student performance?

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Public school teachers in Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia and Arizona are striking this spring, affecting hundreds of thousands of students. The teachers say that spending more money on education will help children learn more. There’s an excellent article by Joy Pullmann in The Federalist that looks at whether increasing spending raises student performance. (H/T Vanessa)

Oklahoma teachers want a $10,000 raise, and Arizona teachers want a 20% increase in base pay. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get anything near that for my annual raise.

Educational bureacracy

Will raising taxes on taxpayers in order to spend more on education improve student performance? Joy says we can look at the past in order to understand whether spending more money gets results.

She writes:

Research has also long and conclusively shown that school spending hikes usually don’t go to teachers, they go to administrators and other bloat outside classrooms. So the kids are just unions’ human shields on their way to raid the kids’ public bank accounts — again.

[…]As the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey has shown, U.S. public K-12 spending has skyrocketed over the past 50 years with no improvement in academic outcomes. Other researchers repeatedly find increasing spending doesn’t help students. That’s because, as noted above, schools typically don’t send more money to classrooms, they use it to increase bureaucracy and nonacademic programming.

Got that? When taxpayers throw money at public schools, the teachers don’t see very much of that money. It gets put into education administrators and indoctrinators – people whose sole job is to make sure that the children accept secular left values.

Check out this graph of education spending compared to test scores:

Federal spending has increased astronomically, but test scores are flat
Federal spending has increased astronomically, but test scores are flat

Spending more doesn’t produce the results that parents are looking for, for their children. Parents want children to learn what they need to find work and become financially independent. But teachers, adminsitrators, etc. have a very different goal: making little secular leftists. And that’s what they use increased funding for that. Numbers don’t lie.

Another way that public schools waste money is by promising massive gold-plated public sector pensions to teachers – pensions that no private sector  taxpayer would ever get themselves. And they use any increase in their budgets to pay the pensions of teachers who are retired, and not helping students to learn.

Teacher pensions

I saw a really nice map of the United States over at Daily Signal, with all the outstanding pensions liabilities, and the amount ranges from about $7600 in Tennessee (the best state in the union) to tens of thousands in the big blue socialist states.

Unfunded pension liabilities for public sector workers
Unfunded pension liabilities for public sector workers

Joy explains:

States promised such outsized retirement benefits to the last generation of public-school teachers that they’re paying off this promise with current revenues. A national average of $6,800 per year per teacher pays former teachers’ pensions that state and local governments failed to save up for while those teachers were working. That’s money that could have instead boosted current teachers’ salaries. The problem is only going to get worse as more baby boomers retire and legislatures continue to hide their heads in the sand.

It’s not just that states and districts failed to save up for pensions they knew would come due, it’s that they offered literally the cushiest pensions available to teachers, notes a 2016 study: “as a group, [teachers] have by far the highest retirement costs, even compared with other public-sector employees. While the average civilian employee receives $1.78 for retirement benefits per hour of work, public school teachers receive $6.22 per hour in retirement compensation.”

Like I said, I don’t have a pension funded by taxpayers. I’m having to saving for my own retirement, as well of the retirement of these wealthy government workers. Public sector benefits are paid by taxpayers in the private (free market) sector. We are the ones wh have to make products and services that consumers are actually willing to pay for in a free market. Unlike teachers, I can’t go on strike if I feel I’m not paid enough. If I go on strike, I’ll be fired. But they go on strike, holding children hostage to get more money. With no guarantee of improved student performance.

Joy also notes that teachers are actually vastly overpaid already, based on what their marketable skills:

[…][R]esearch finds teachers are overpaid by an average of 50 percent relative to their skills and mental abilities. The overage comes almost exclusively from their fat benefit packages.

The reason they complain about pay is because the majority of their pay is going into extravagant health care, paid time off, pension, paid training, etc. benefits. When you add back all those benefits, they’re being overpaid compared to an equivalent private sector worker.

Regulations

Another factor that lowers student performance is that the fact that teachers are highly regulated. Instead of spending their time teaching students, they are forced to waste time doing other non-teaching tasks.

Joy explains:

Education regulations are almost always decided by non-teachers, and the effects are about what you would guess from that fact. Rather than benefiting students, these regulations typically require or justify ever-expanding employment for the very bureaucrat types who come up with them. I’m talking about things like teacher licensing mandates, which researchers have long found do not improve teacher quality and traffic in disproven education fads (but do provide easy-access cash cows for state departments of education and teacher colleges since teachers are required to keep buying their products to maintain certification); ever-increasing testing and data-entry mandates; centralized curriculum mandates like Common Core; centralized teacher evaluation and ratings systems; and the massive data entry required to document things like student behavior problems and special education services.

More money being wasted that doesn’t help students to learn more at all.

So what’s the solution?

The solution is to allow parents to choose who provides their children with an education, instead of having the money automatically taxed and spent by a massive secular left education bureaucracy. If teachers have their money in their hands, they will spend it where they can get the best quality for the best price – just like they do in every other area of their lives. That might be scary for teachers, administrators and indoctrinators, but in a free market, the parents should not be obligated to pay for something they don’t want. We should be concerned about the children first and foremost.

News

New study: children of working single mothers are 25% more likely to be obese

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Out-of-wedlocks births rising as cohabitation replaces marriage
Out-of-wedlocks births rising as cohabitation replaces marriage

It’s getting to be very common for women to have children out of wedlock, especially since many countries increase welfare programs design to encourage single motherhood. That’s because of feminism, which encourages women to ignore the traditional male virtues, like commitment, and tradional commitment itself (because marriage is “sexist”). But do children do well in the fatherless homes created by feminism and welfare?

Here’s a recent study reported in the UK Sun. (H/T Thomas)

Excerpt:

SCIENTISTS have laid the blame for Britain’s childhood obesity epidemic at the door of working mothers, in a new study.

The shocking findings also claim the kids of mums who work are negatively affected – whereas the father’s employment appears to have no “significant effect”.

A study carried out by University College London looked at 20,000 families, and is the first to link mums who work to the weight of their children.

Professor Emla Fitzsimons told The Sunday Times: “We find that children whose mothers work are more likely to have increased sedentary behaviour and poorer dietary habits.”

Researchers said the bizarre findings were more obvious for single mums who work full-time, but also revealed a pattern with mums who work and have a partner.

But the study added it doesn’t matter if mums work full-time or part-time, their child is still more likely to be fatter than that of a non working mum.

It describes obesity as “the most common chronic disease of childhood and likely to persist into adulthood with far-reaching effects”.

And found teens and children have gained weight over the past four decades along with a rise in working mums – with kids of single working mothers 25 per cent more likely to be overweight.

It suggested kids of mums who work full time are 29 per cent less likely to eat a regular breakfast and 19 per cent more likely to watch TV for more than three hours a day.

The UK is one of the countries that most strongly embraced feminism, and sought to encourage fatherlessness with unfair divorce laws, unfair divorce courts, and generous benefits for women who divorced with kids or never bothered to even marry before having kids. It’s common now for UK single mothers to just have sex with the hottest guys they can find, knock out babies with all the different “fathers”, and sit back and collect welfare. Welfare funded by the ever-shrinking supply of working husbands, who typically earn the most, and therefore pay the most in taxes.

But’s not just working SINGLE mothers who have problems.

The UK Daily Mail (reporting on the same study) notes that the increase in obese children mirrors the growth in women working part-time or full-time outside the home:

[…][T]he dramatic increase in the numbers of obese children and teenagers over the past four decades had been accompanied by a similarly sharp rise in the employment of mothers.

In the UK, the proportion of working mothers with children under the age of five rose from 31 per cent in 1980 to 58 per cent in 2008.

The UK prioritized getting women out of the home and working, and handing children off to day cares and public schools. Even the conservative party refused to give women a tax incentive to raise their young children. They gave the tax credit to working mothers instead, encouraging more women to abandon their children for work.

The Root Cause of the Problem

We really need to discourage women from starting up relationships with men who aren’t interested in commitment. When women treat relationships as a source of “fun” instead of as an enterprise aimed at commitment and stability, they often end up raising fatherless kids. The problems begin with the woman’s choice of man, and her purpose for the relationship. If she expects the relationship to be about entertaining her, then she will choose an entertaining man. One who doesn’t expect her to do anything she doesn’t feel like doing, and has no particular plan for her, or raising children well.

Many women today, even Christian women, love to laugh and scorn the idea that there are any “best practices” for relationships. They know everything there is to know – without having to read any studies that might force them to control their desires and make plans to succeed that involve self-denial and wisdom. But if you ignore the studies, you can be certain that you and your children will pay the price. There’s no sense expect hunky fun bad boys to “man up” after you’ve already given them premarital sex. The time to get men to act like a man is when the woman chooses who to have a relationship with. If you choose a MAN, who protects, provides and leads on moral and spiritual issues, then you get a REAL MAN who is already MANNED UP.

The solution to problems like abortion and fatherless children is to encourage young women to make better decisions when choosing men for relationships – and to prioritize marriage as the goal of their relationships, too. It would be nice if pastors preached a little self-control, chastity and anti-feminism to women in churches. So far, though, I’ve never seen it. The Christian church approach to the problems caused by fatherlessness seems to be “let women make poor choices, then tell them it’s not their fault, then blame men”.