Study discovers Swedes are less well-off than the poorest Americans

Reuters via Haaretz ^ | 5/4/2002 | Reuters

[l33t]

STOCKHOLM - Swedes, usually perceived in Europe as a comfortable, middle class lot, are poorer than African Americans, the most economically-deprived group in the United States, a Swedish study showed yesterday.

The study by a retail trade lobby, published in the liberal Dagens Nyheter newspaper 19 weeks before the next general election, echoed the center-right opposition's criticism of the weak state of Sweden's economy, following decades of almost uninterrupted Social Democratic rule.

The Swedish Research Institute of Trade (HUI) said it had compared official U.S. and Swedish statistics on household income, as well as gross domestic product, private consumption and retail spending per capita between 1980 and 1999.

Using fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data, the median household income in Sweden at the end of the 1990s was the equivalent of $26,800, compared with a median of $39,400 for U.S. households, HUI's study showed.

"Weak growth means that Sweden has lost greatly in prosperity compared with the United States," HUI's president, Fredrik Bergstrom, and chief economist, Robert Gidehag, said.

International Monetary Fund data from 2001 show that U.S. GDP per capita in dollar terms was 56 percent higher than in Sweden, while in 1980, Swedish GDP per capita was 20 percent higher.

"Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household," the HUI economists said.

If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest, measured by household gross income before taxes, Bergstrom and Gidehag said.

They said they had chosen that measure for their comparison to get around the differences in taxation and welfare structures. Capital gains such as income from securities were not included.

The median income of African American households was about 70 percent of the median for all U.S. households, while Swedish households earned 68 percent of the overall U.S. median level.

This means that Swedes stood "below groups, which, in the Swedish debate, are usually regarded as poor and losers in the American economy," Bergstrom and Gidehag said.

Between 1980 and 1999, the gross income of Sweden's poorest households increased by just over 6 percent, while the poorest in the United States enjoyed a three times higher increase, HUI said.

If the trend persists, "things that are commonplace in the United States will be regarded as the utmost luxury in Sweden," the authors said. "We are not quite there yet, but the trend is clear."

According to HUI figures, during the period 1998-1999, U.S. GDP per capita was 40 percent higher than in Sweden, while U.S. private consumption and retail sales per capita exceeded Swedish levels by more than 80 percent.

The HUI economists attributed the much bigger difference in consumption and sales mainly to the fact that U.S. households pay themselves for education and health care, services that are tax-financed and come for free or at low user charges in Sweden.

According to recent opinion polls Sweden's Social Democrats are comfortably ahead of the center-right opposition in the run-up to the September 15 elections.

[l33t]

Socialism never worked.

[Lockbox]

Does Sweden still have its regressive tax system?

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Liberals love to claim that socialism is great and that the USSR failed because they didn't go about it right. They hold up socialist countries in Europe, like Sweden and France, as examples. There's just one problem. These European models of socialism keep crashing and burning.

[Moonman62]

These European models of socialism keep crashing and burning.

They must not be doing it right either.

[Moonman62]

I wonder if Brokaw, Rather, and Jennings will cover this story.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

I don't know. But I've heard American liberals try to justify high taxes, many times, by saying, "Look at these countries in Europe. They pay a 70% income tax and look at how great they're doing and look at all the wonderful services that their governments are providing."

It's all a big farce.

[FITZ]

It seems we have an awful lot of Socialism. I find it hard to believe there is really more in other places---I don't think our economy can tolerate much more.

[riri]

All part of the big European facade. The place is not the high cultured land of sophistication and opulense that we have been lead to believe. I found it rainy,depressing and basically lacking in most everything-except old beautiful buildings.

[wimpycat]

Alabama or Sweden?

[Torie]

The Swedes also have longer holidays. It some ways, a study like this is apples and oranges.

[airedale]

They also have a major population bomb that's getting much closer to exploding and taking their entire system down with them. They already are taxed at close to 90% of their income and a Swede in the top 5% has $5,000 US in the bank and owns their home. The population is growing at less than replacement something like 1.25 to 1.5 per couple and continuing to drop. They have a fairly large population bubble of baby boomers that's just approaching the age that they will be leaving the work force. Since the populations behind them to support them in their old age is much smaller it would require a larger chunch of tax $$ to support them. When you are being taxed at 95% already it doesn't leave room for a tax increase. The only alternative is to cut services or perhaps get the old people to die off more quickly so they aren't a burden on society. If they take in a lot of immigrants to support their older people they loose their culture as the real Swedes become a smaller and smaller minority in their own country over time. No matter which way they go it's a no win situation.

[Cicero]

I went to a meeting of a group of literary scholars not long after the dissolution of the USSR. One of my marxist-inclined colleagues explained, when asked how come the great Soviet experiment had collapsed, contrary to all predictions, by saying that, according to Marx, you can't have true Communism until you first go through capitalism. But Russia, foolishly eager, went straight from Czarist feudalism to Communism instead of taking things slowly in the proper historical order that Marx had predicted.

So, she concluded, Russia needed to have a century or so of capitalist development. Then they could try Communism all over again, and this time it would succeed. She evidently was looking forward to the day.

[Nogbad]

Sweden got rich during WWII
by staying neutral
and selling to both sides.

They remained rich for a while
after the war,
and told the world
their wealth was the result
of their social system.

Many fools believed them
and political 'scientists' went there
to learn about their system.

[Senator Pardek]

The Swedes also have longer holidays. It some ways, a study like this is apples and oranges.

Not quite. Homeless people have the longest vacations of all. One pays for one's vacations with "quality of life".

BTW how are things going at the Pentagon? ;)

[Drango]

How are they compared to the French?

[Snickersnee]

When Sweden adopted Socialism at the end of the XIX Century, they canvassed the population to see who was most likely to be a drag on the system -- the shiftless, the mentally slow, the big families -- and they exported them to North America en masse. I think it amounted to almost ten percent of the whole kingdom emigrating over a few years' time. As we know, these went largely to the Upper Midwest, where they were wildly successful. That's what happens when you have liberty.

On the other hand, they gave us the likes of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Paul Wellstone....

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #10

Longer holiday's benefit might not be big enough to cancel the effect of higher price in just about every consumer commodity on one's pocketbook.

[Torie]

I don't believe any of the three you mentioned are Swedish. Mondale is Norwegian.

[Torie]

Just fine, although we are undergoing some personnel changes. As usual, I'm on top.

[DallasMike]

Homeless people have the longest vacations of all.

Really? How about the benefits? My current job hardly lets me see my home anyway, so I probably wouldn't miss it.