Posted on 05/04/2002 3:41:42 PM PDT by 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.
Hmmmm... If I were single, which of the three frères would I choose? The passionate music lover? The jet-setting naturalist? The intellectual accountant? ...Oh, I’d just take them all.
"This describes the biggest economic cost of welfarism. It's not the high taxes, it's not the cost of regulation, it's not the idiotic governmental malinvestment. The biggest cost is the loss of economic growth."Kermit, you're absolutely right. The opportunity cost is economic growth. And that's from all of that you list. This was the point that Senator Byrd missed when he had his heated exchange with Sec. O'Neal over the picture of Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians in the budget document--a point that all on the left miss.
Always entirely of their own choosing. They keep doggedly oscillating between fascism and socialism and, when their governments run out of money to print and debt to issue, they start a war.
and if they want to structure their society differently than ours I see no reason for the hostility and acrimony some have expressed.
Fine with me, but let them foot their own bill. Europe dabbles with utopia and provides day spas and summer vacations for marginally-skilled laborers and counts on the U.S. to cover for their defense. Now that the money's run out, they're having to import a tax base, only to find, surprise surprise, the North Africans, Occidentals, and Slavs have no intention of being their pack mules.
Europe has been busily making its social democrat/communist bed for the past two centuries. They are welcome to sleep in it.
That just means you don't like the result.
>Actually, the Swedish economy is pretty efficient.
Actually it is not.
> The economy is not really socialist, it is redistributionist. It is a complex topic, and complex economic subjects are ill suited to this forum.
That means you are in way over your head. Try and prove this and you will find how far down the intellectual food chain you really are here in FR.
I was in town in Oregon today and stopped by a convenience store. Not only were the pickup trucks out front not locked, but some were left running unattended with their heaters on while the drivers went inside. They would do that in Scandinavia too, but they can't afford pickup trucks.
Of course they also sold ammo in the stores, so a thief would not get far. And everybody knows it.
Kiss my a$$!
>My American friends whom I see quite frequently are intensley jealous of the holidays they all seem to have in Europe. One from Kansas remarked the other day that he had to work 20 plus years to get the amount of holidays everybody gets here. It was a shock to him!
Tell your your lazy friends to get a REAL job.
>Actually the quality of life in a country increases with the less a person is expected to work.
Yes, our welfare parasites probably make more money than you do on your govt job.
>Sad but true! And it ain't got nothing to do with any ...ism's.
Yes it does. It has to do with CAPITALISM and ENTREPRENEURISM, or the lack thereof. I retired at 50 and have had every day off since. (Thank You Ronald Reagan.) And I don't live on government checks either, thank you very much.
Nothing you don't like can be correct, can it?
I think both Humphrey and Mondale are Norwegians. Wellstone is Jewish.(?)
If so, a VERY slow one. The myth that Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa are Republican states has persisted for decades, but a look at the States that went Democrat in the last number of elections tells all. (Minneapolis area is just like the Seattle area. So large and nutso they carry the entire states.)
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