Apontamentos sobre o modelo sueco

If Sweden’s Big Welfare State Is Superior to America’s Medium Welfare State, then Why Do Swedes in America Earn Far More than Swedes in Sweden?:

..nations such as Sweden and Denmark are examples of how to do the wrong thing in the best possible fashion. They have large welfare states, but they compensate with very pro-market policies in other areas.

Indeed, Sweden is a good example of a nation that has implemented some good reforms in recent years, such as school choice and partial Social Security privatization.

But I argue that these good reforms don’t fully offset the damage caused by excessive government spending. And now I have a new – and very pointy – arrow in my argumentative quiver. A study from the London-based Institute for Economic Affairs has found that Swedes in America earn significantly more money than Swedes in Sweden.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the IEA study.

The 4.4 million or so Americans with Swedish origins are considerably richer than average Americans, as are other immigrant groups from Scandinavia .. Swedes living in the USA are thus approximately 53 per cent more wealthy than Swedes (excluding immigrants) in their native country .. It should be noted that those Swedes who migrated to the USA, predominately in the nineteenth century, were anything but the elite. Rather, it was often those escaping poverty and famine ..

.. a Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’. Indeed, the poverty rate for Americans with Swedish ancestry is only 6.7 per cent: half the US average (US Census).

Suécia corta impostos das empresas para criar emprego:

“Os impostos sobre as empresas são provavelmente os que mais penalizam” a actividade do sector privado, afirmou o primeiro-ministro Fredrik Reinfeldt. Esta redução vai ter um custo de 8,8 mil milhões de coroas suecas (cerca de mil milhões de euros) em receitas fiscais, que vão ser compensadas por uma diminuição das deduções das empresas com o serviço da dívida.

Esta é a segunda vez que o país reduz a taxa que cobra sobre os lucros das empresas desde a crise do subprime em 2008.