if you start including the people who have been given early retirement because they were deemed unemployable, or those in different government reeducation or temporary placement programs, the unemployment rate is closer to 15%.
The U.S. does exactly the same thing, with about the same difference between the sizes of the population and the labor force.
there are hidden taxes on labour, in the form of taxes on companies for employing people
Again, the U.S. has very similar "hidden" employment taxes (e.g., FICA, Unemployment, Social Security.)
the justice system has been on the brink of collapse for 15 years. A minority of all crimes even get investigated.
Again, exactly the same in the U.S.
There is state health care, but it involves long waiting lines, deteriorating service, and is in a constant state of crisis.
Here, of course, is where the U.S. and Sweden part company. Perhaps this difference is why Swedes enjoy, on average, 2.4 years of additional life expectancy at birth.
the education is sub par compared to the rest of the EU.
Below average at the pinacle, eh? Your 99% literacy rate is a lot higher than that of the U.S., which refuses to even publish a correct literacy rate accounting for our undocumented immigrants.
marginal taxes for big income groups are well above 60% if your income. In short, you are punished for working!
Even with a multi-bracket system, there is never any situation where earning more money results in less take-home income. There was a problem with that in Sweden several years ago (some famous writer ended up with a 105% tax rate due to a law quirk) but they simplified their laws and now the top bracket rate sits at 57% on income over the exemption limit.
to pull out a scandinavian country as a role model is misguided.
Sweden's standard of living is below that of the lowest standard of living of any US state.
On the contrary, the suitability index for child rearing is designed to be a big aggregate standard of living measure, with some extra woman's issues mixed in, published every Mothers' Day. This year, Sweden was 1st, and the U.S. was 11th.
No matter how you slice it -- life expectancy (+2.4 years), unemployment (2% less), literacy (from 2% to 14% more, depending on whether you belive U.S. statistics ignoring undocumented workers), median purchasing power ($8,000 more per capita) -- Sweden's standard of living is superior to that of the U.S.
You are saying that "OK, we fucked up urban planning...
No, I am not. I'm saying we fucked up the primary education that would have made the urban planning tolerable.
... NOW we're after health care and social security". And I'm supposed to think that the liberals will do a better job with health care than they did with welfare?
The liberals instituted medicare and social security in the first place, under the constraints of a tax base not much more than that of Mexico's as a percent of GDP. The fact that it's not already broke amazes me.
I'm a libertarian.
Please tell me, what is the libertarian model for funding ambulance services?
there are many many many in your wing of the political spectrum who would in fact take away all hand guns, rifles, and other firearms. You have to acknowledge that to be taken seriously.
Who in congress has proposed banning handguns in the past decade? The most I've seen proposed is a foiled attempt to get mandatory trigger locks (mandatory to own them, not necessarily use them) and some attempts to get a way to clearly show when semiautomatics have a round in the chamber. Are you and I reading news from the same capitol?
Taking away rifles is ever more absurd. Get your tinfoill hat and see if you can dodge those black helecopters.
The assault rifle ban is going to expire, with the Republicans in charge, just as the crime rate is on the upswing. Great.
If a tax plan like yours ever goes through I'm afraid I'd be forced to move offshore or buy a fanny pack if I wanted to go out after dark.
I don't think you understand that liberals these days couldn't care less about public housing and restoring welfare. Our top priorities are universal health care (not a whole lot more money than Medicare for the boomers, really), education (better preschool, class sizes, and college tution aid would be a good start), and figuring out how to pay for your social security when you retire.
We aren't going to come take away your gun, as much as I might personally belive that to be a good thing. We are well aware that the Republicans know how to siphon that top percent money into campaign ads one way or another, so we want you to be armed in case another John Ashcroft shows up at 3 a.m.
A) Have you ever lived outside the United States for longer than one Month?
Yes, in Germany.
B) If Yes, Have you ever had to deal with a Non-U.S. Gov for anything important?
Yes, assuming you think having a child, obtaining a birth certificate, etc., is important.
C) If Yes, Do you know anyone that was born and raised within this country?
Yes, many people.
D) If Yes, What does this person think about their system of government/taxation/health care/social services?
I would be hard pressed to find a single German citizen in a thousand who prefers the U.S. work week and typical vacation schedule. So their taxes are higher, so they get more time off. It's a wash. TANSTAAFL.
Yes, right, for the few years that there was a 70% top bracket in the U.S. (for mostly corporate incomes over $500,000, IIRC), there were also lots of deductions, shelters, and other loopholes, so that the tax rate as a fraction of GDP was around 18%.
That $44 trillion of US Federal debt provides a tremendious amount of liquidity to world financial markets....
Like $20,000 of consumer debt provides tremendous liquidity to Visa and MasterCard? No way; the national debt is simply a means of passing the buck to the next generation. If the U.S. wasn't selling debt, then that $7 trillion that U.S. common stocks lost since 1999 would likely still be in people's pension and college funds.
It wasn't too long ago that our leaders in the U.S. prided themselves that "the buck stops here." It wasn't too long ago that we had a budget surplus. These days, we have neither.
Eliminating it or even reducing it below certain levels wouldn't be a good thing.
A good thing for who? Osama bin Laden? Every dollar Uncle Sam pays off the debt is several cents per year saved in interest.
Both social security and medicare are in need of massive reform.
You can say that again. Next time, please try it without the pathetic rationalizations.
With their citizens enjoying 2.4 years more life expectancy than those of us in the U.S.
2) They have a... homogeneous work force
In that they have a 99% literacy rate, while the U.S. has 97% (what a joke! As a certified literacy tutor, I can personally attest that the U.S. English literacy rate, including undocumented workers, is closer to 85%.)
3) Because they are a small country, they can depend on other countries for things like defense
They spend 2.1% of their GDP on defense.
4) since they are a small country, their economy is a tiny fraction of something like the US
Their economy is 69% services, whereas the U.S. economy is 80% services. Which do you think is more robust?
you are never going to grow too much and have jaw dropping increases from year to year.
Tell that to Volvo, Ikea, and Ericsson.
you can lower the tax rate and hopefully spur the economy to boil up
Yeah, right. You supply siders never fail to amuse me. Perhaps you would be credible if Mitch Daniels wasn't thinking of the economy of Tahiti rather than that of the U.S. right now.
There is no way 30 year debt would be so cheap if what you say is true.
Oh, yes there is. If you hadn't noticed, dispite the commercial and consumer debt sectors purporting to be market-based, interest rates in the U.S. have been institutionalized by congress as a command economy. If Greenspan and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency say the prime rate goes up, it goes up, and if they say it goes down, well, they have about 1.5% left before they get to zero.
I'm not claiming that the market doesn't play a part. If the consumer economy (about 2/3 of the GDP) was actually robust, there would be a lot more demand for homeowner credit, and that would push rates up faster that you can say "Freddy Mac."
We are teetering on the brink. The baby boomers are looking at their health insurance go up 8-10% annually, and thinking about retirement. Something has to give.
Look, why not go to Sweden's two-bracket steeply progressive system? Are you going to offer any reasons not to?
why did federal tax revenues nearly triple from 1980 to 1988?
Because of GDP growth and increased dependence on regressive forms of taxation.
The US national debt is a low percentage of the US GDP.
Tell that to the currency traders who have been dumping dollars for euros like mad over the past month. The truth is that the present value of the U.S. deficit in perpetuity is about $44 trillion, which has us teetering on the brink of insolvency at our current tax rates. Look at the pie charts in the back of your federal income tax instruction booklet; do you see the slice labled "interest on the national debt"? Now open Barron's or the Wall Street Journal and have a look at historical interest rates. If you ignore the brief run-up in the several months preceding the 2000 election, you will note that they have been at all time lows. What do you suppose would happen to the size of that pie slice representing interest if rates returned to 1982 levels? Here are some hints: David Stockman, "Read my lips...," Paul O'Niell, Mitch Daniels.
There is no way we can support the health and pension costs of the baby boomers as they retire without a radical rebracketing of income tax rates, and there is no reason not to select Sweden's simple brackets, based on the clear emperical evidence of their excellent society in terms of education, worker training, unemployment and inflation rates, parent support with daycare, social services, etc. Swedish unemployment levels are not what anyone associates with a "socialist" or "welfare state." They simply have a two-bracket, steeply progressive, egalitarian income tax that grows their middle class while ours in the U.S. is shrinking.
A shrinking middle class puts us on a collision course with riots, not unlike those the president's father faced a dozen years ago.
People like you also run around telling everyone that the US spends way too much on defense...
It would be easy to get rid of the U.S. national debt, if we didn't have the lowest tax rate of all but one of the industrialized nations. Take a look at the country with the highest tax rate as a fraction of GDP, Sweden; they have very responsible debt levels (unlike ours), along with 4% unemployment (we just hit a nine-year record high above 6%) and very reasonable 2.2% inflation. Moreover, Sweden is way ahead of the U.S. in the only way known to make more citizens. While Sweden is the best place to raise kids, the U.S. has increasing crime rates (which tend to correlate with unemployment), and therefore likely soon-to-be-decreasing property values.
What is Sweden's secret? Progressive taxation. Average production workers in Sweden pay no income tax to their central government because the bottom bracket starts about a tenth above the average production worker's salary. The Swedish tax rate is typically about 57% of income earned above that base. Sweden only has two central government tax brackets: 0% and 25%, so their "federal" taxes are actually closer to the "flat tax" than ours are in the U.S. The additional 32% or so varies by local jurisdiction, as does the income bracket at which it takes effect.
The problem in the U.S. is that top-bracket income earners (including corporations, medium-sized businesses, and most of the top 1% rich, excluding some of the prominent top rich in the media spotlight) pay a huge amount of money in order to help elect government officials who will keep the top tax brackets low. This effectivly "saves" them an even larger amount of money, except for the externalities like crime rate, debt, and property values. We used to have regulations providing equal air time for federal candidates, but Reagan's FCC did away with those, so most candidates today, even most nationally prominent Democrats, sure know which side of their bread is buttered on. There are some notable exceptions, however.
Modern wind turbines are very quiet. Perhaps you have heard the 1970s models on Altamont pass, which are noisy.
It is easy to defrost turbine blades, in populated areas. But you only need 14,000 acres of turbine footprint to convert the entire current U.S. electricity usage to wind power. Thats about twice the area of the Stanford U. campus, or about as much Oak forest as is lost in California each year. Cats kill more than two decimal orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines do.
If the entire planet converted to wind electricity in thirty years, it would take another 300 years to extract the same amount of energy from the atmosphere as fossil fuel consumption has thusfar forced into the troposphere. Equitorial alignments are safe.
Wind and solar require vast land area for reasonable power amounts.
On the contrary, the entire United States of America can be converted to wind power electricity using only 14,000 acres of turbine footprint area on existing farmland, pasture, and prarie. That's about twice the area of the Stanford University campus, or about as much Oak forest lost in California each year.
There is no reason that wind should not be the major U.S. source of electricity in 2018.
Please tell Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Based on his Energy Committee testimony this week, nobody has explained this to him yet. Please phone +1.202.452.3204 and ask for Michelle Smith or Andrew Williams.
The entire United States of America can be converted to wind power electricity using only 14,000 acres of turbine footprint area on existing farmland, pasture, and prarie. That's about twice the area of the Stanford University campus, or about as much Oak forest lost in California each year.
There is no reason that wind should not be the major U.S. source of electricity in 2018.
Please tell Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Based on his Energy Committee testimony this week, nobody has explained this to him yet. Please phone +1.202.452.3204 and ask for Michelle Smith or Andrew Williams.
If you have a wind turbine, and it cannot convert its power directly to electricity, it takes 10x longer to pay for itself when it procuces H2. Currently, I understand the payback periods are on the order of 15 years for an "average" site and about 8 years for an "ideal" site.
That seems absurd to me. The capital cost of modern wind turbines is about the same as several street lamp posts, and they generate an amortized quarter megawatt per 36 square feet of land use.
Would you please cite your sources for those claims, and/or revise them with accurate data?
The entire United States of American can be converted to wind power electricity using only 14,000 acres of turbine footprint area on existing farmland, pasture, and prarie. That's about twice the area of the Stanford University campus, or about as much Oak forest lost in California each year.
There is no reason that wind should not be the major U.S. source of electricity in 2018.
Someone please tell Alan Greenspan. +1.202.452.3204. Ask for Michelle Smith or Andrew Williams.
Doesn't coal dump like 10 times as much radioactive waste per unit of power then nuclear energy?
Yes, in the U.S. The way the Europeans scrub it, I think it works out to between 3 and 5 times as much, unless you count Chernobel.
Watching Alan Greenspan on C-SPAN this week, taking Energy committee questions in favor of fossil fuels, and not taking every opportunity to suggest building wind power (because he loves globalization so much he's willing to compromise energy independence, I suppose.)
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. does exactly the same thing, with about the same difference between the sizes of the population and the labor force.
Again, the U.S. has very similar "hidden" employment taxes (e.g., FICA, Unemployment, Social Security.)
Again, exactly the same in the U.S.
Here, of course, is where the U.S. and Sweden part company. Perhaps this difference is why Swedes enjoy, on average, 2.4 years of additional life expectancy at birth.
Below average at the pinacle, eh? Your 99% literacy rate is a lot higher than that of the U.S., which refuses to even publish a correct literacy rate accounting for our undocumented immigrants.
I wish.
Even with a multi-bracket system, there is never any situation where earning more money results in less take-home income. There was a problem with that in Sweden several years ago (some famous writer ended up with a 105% tax rate due to a law quirk) but they simplified their laws and now the top bracket rate sits at 57% on income over the exemption limit.
What do you think would make a better role model?
On the contrary, the suitability index for child rearing is designed to be a big aggregate standard of living measure, with some extra woman's issues mixed in, published every Mothers' Day. This year, Sweden was 1st, and the U.S. was 11th.
No matter how you slice it -- life expectancy (+2.4 years), unemployment (2% less), literacy (from 2% to 14% more, depending on whether you belive U.S. statistics ignoring undocumented workers), median purchasing power ($8,000 more per capita) -- Sweden's standard of living is superior to that of the U.S.
Which therefore stopped a decade ago.
What about Ikea? A U.S.-backed plot to help introduce brightly-painted modular furniture into drab Soviet homes and offices?
No, I am not. I'm saying we fucked up the primary education that would have made the urban planning tolerable.
The liberals instituted medicare and social security in the first place, under the constraints of a tax base not much more than that of Mexico's as a percent of GDP. The fact that it's not already broke amazes me.
Please tell me, what is the libertarian model for funding ambulance services?
Who in congress has proposed banning handguns in the past decade? The most I've seen proposed is a foiled attempt to get mandatory trigger locks (mandatory to own them, not necessarily use them) and some attempts to get a way to clearly show when semiautomatics have a round in the chamber. Are you and I reading news from the same capitol?
Taking away rifles is ever more absurd. Get your tinfoill hat and see if you can dodge those black helecopters.
The assault rifle ban is going to expire, with the Republicans in charge, just as the crime rate is on the upswing. Great.
You would guess wrong by a margin of about 100%.
Wrong again, 35/M/urban Mountain View, CA.
The capacity of the human mind to accommodate contradiction never ceases to amaze me.
I don't think you understand that liberals these days couldn't care less about public housing and restoring welfare. Our top priorities are universal health care (not a whole lot more money than Medicare for the boomers, really), education (better preschool, class sizes, and college tution aid would be a good start), and figuring out how to pay for your social security when you retire.
We aren't going to come take away your gun, as much as I might personally belive that to be a good thing. We are well aware that the Republicans know how to siphon that top percent money into campaign ads one way or another, so we want you to be armed in case another John Ashcroft shows up at 3 a.m.
Yes, in Germany.
Yes, assuming you think having a child, obtaining a birth certificate, etc., is important.
Yes, many people.
I would be hard pressed to find a single German citizen in a thousand who prefers the U.S. work week and typical vacation schedule. So their taxes are higher, so they get more time off. It's a wash. TANSTAAFL.
Yes, right, for the few years that there was a 70% top bracket in the U.S. (for mostly corporate incomes over $500,000, IIRC), there were also lots of deductions, shelters, and other loopholes, so that the tax rate as a fraction of GDP was around 18%.
Like $20,000 of consumer debt provides tremendous liquidity to Visa and MasterCard? No way; the national debt is simply a means of passing the buck to the next generation. If the U.S. wasn't selling debt, then that $7 trillion that U.S. common stocks lost since 1999 would likely still be in people's pension and college funds.
It wasn't too long ago that our leaders in the U.S. prided themselves that "the buck stops here." It wasn't too long ago that we had a budget surplus. These days, we have neither.
A good thing for who? Osama bin Laden? Every dollar Uncle Sam pays off the debt is several cents per year saved in interest.
You can say that again. Next time, please try it without the pathetic rationalizations.
On the contrary, there were devastating riots in Los Angeles in late April, 1992.
In that they have a 99% literacy rate, while the U.S. has 97% (what a joke! As a certified literacy tutor, I can personally attest that the U.S. English literacy rate, including undocumented workers, is closer to 85%.)
They spend 2.1% of their GDP on defense.
Their economy is 69% services, whereas the U.S. economy is 80% services. Which do you think is more robust?
On the contrary, plotting the tax rates of various jurisdictions against their growth rates yeilds a correlation below 0.1.
Where, on Neptune?
Tell that to Volvo, Ikea, and Ericsson.
Yeah, right. You supply siders never fail to amuse me. Perhaps you would be credible if Mitch Daniels wasn't thinking of the economy of Tahiti rather than that of the U.S. right now.
Oh, yes there is. If you hadn't noticed, dispite the commercial and consumer debt sectors purporting to be market-based, interest rates in the U.S. have been institutionalized by congress as a command economy. If Greenspan and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency say the prime rate goes up, it goes up, and if they say it goes down, well, they have about 1.5% left before they get to zero.
I'm not claiming that the market doesn't play a part. If the consumer economy (about 2/3 of the GDP) was actually robust, there would be a lot more demand for homeowner credit, and that would push rates up faster that you can say "Freddy Mac."
We are teetering on the brink. The baby boomers are looking at their health insurance go up 8-10% annually, and thinking about retirement. Something has to give.
Look, why not go to Sweden's two-bracket steeply progressive system? Are you going to offer any reasons not to?
Because of GDP growth and increased dependence on regressive forms of taxation.
Tell that to the currency traders who have been dumping dollars for euros like mad over the past month. The truth is that the present value of the U.S. deficit in perpetuity is about $44 trillion, which has us teetering on the brink of insolvency at our current tax rates. Look at the pie charts in the back of your federal income tax instruction booklet; do you see the slice labled "interest on the national debt"? Now open Barron's or the Wall Street Journal and have a look at historical interest rates. If you ignore the brief run-up in the several months preceding the 2000 election, you will note that they have been at all time lows. What do you suppose would happen to the size of that pie slice representing interest if rates returned to 1982 levels? Here are some hints: David Stockman, "Read my lips...," Paul O'Niell, Mitch Daniels.
There is no way we can support the health and pension costs of the baby boomers as they retire without a radical rebracketing of income tax rates, and there is no reason not to select Sweden's simple brackets, based on the clear emperical evidence of their excellent society in terms of education, worker training, unemployment and inflation rates, parent support with daycare, social services, etc. Swedish unemployment levels are not what anyone associates with a "socialist" or "welfare state." They simply have a two-bracket, steeply progressive, egalitarian income tax that grows their middle class while ours in the U.S. is shrinking.
A shrinking middle class puts us on a collision course with riots, not unlike those the president's father faced a dozen years ago.
Indeed I do.
What is Sweden's secret? Progressive taxation. Average production workers in Sweden pay no income tax to their central government because the bottom bracket starts about a tenth above the average production worker's salary. The Swedish tax rate is typically about 57% of income earned above that base. Sweden only has two central government tax brackets: 0% and 25%, so their "federal" taxes are actually closer to the "flat tax" than ours are in the U.S. The additional 32% or so varies by local jurisdiction, as does the income bracket at which it takes effect.
The problem in the U.S. is that top-bracket income earners (including corporations, medium-sized businesses, and most of the top 1% rich, excluding some of the prominent top rich in the media spotlight) pay a huge amount of money in order to help elect government officials who will keep the top tax brackets low. This effectivly "saves" them an even larger amount of money, except for the externalities like crime rate, debt, and property values. We used to have regulations providing equal air time for federal candidates, but Reagan's FCC did away with those, so most candidates today, even most nationally prominent Democrats, sure know which side of their bread is buttered on. There are some notable exceptions, however.
Modern wind turbines are very quiet. Perhaps you have heard the 1970s models on Altamont pass, which are noisy.
It is easy to defrost turbine blades, in populated areas. But you only need 14,000 acres of turbine footprint to convert the entire current U.S. electricity usage to wind power. Thats about twice the area of the Stanford U. campus, or about as much Oak forest as is lost in California each year. Cats kill more than two decimal orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines do.
If the entire planet converted to wind electricity in thirty years, it would take another 300 years to extract the same amount of energy from the atmosphere as fossil fuel consumption has thusfar forced into the troposphere. Equitorial alignments are safe.
On the contrary, the entire United States of America can be converted to wind power electricity using only 14,000 acres of turbine footprint area on existing farmland, pasture, and prarie. That's about twice the area of the Stanford University campus, or about as much Oak forest lost in California each year.
There is no reason that wind should not be the major U.S. source of electricity in 2018.
Please tell Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Based on his Energy Committee testimony this week, nobody has explained this to him yet. Please phone +1.202.452.3204 and ask for Michelle Smith or Andrew Williams.
There is no reason that wind should not be the major U.S. source of electricity in 2018.
Please tell Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Based on his Energy Committee testimony this week, nobody has explained this to him yet. Please phone +1.202.452.3204 and ask for Michelle Smith or Andrew Williams.
That seems absurd to me. The capital cost of modern wind turbines is about the same as several street lamp posts, and they generate an amortized quarter megawatt per 36 square feet of land use.
Would you please cite your sources for those claims, and/or revise them with accurate data?
There is no reason that wind should not be the major U.S. source of electricity in 2018.
Someone please tell Alan Greenspan. +1.202.452.3204. Ask for Michelle Smith or Andrew Williams.
Yes, in the U.S. The way the Europeans scrub it, I think it works out to between 3 and 5 times as much, unless you count Chernobel.
Watching Alan Greenspan on C-SPAN this week, taking Energy committee questions in favor of fossil fuels, and not taking every opportunity to suggest building wind power (because he loves globalization so much he's willing to compromise energy independence, I suppose.)