to retirement, which comes at age sixty-five, when you’ll get an annual pension equaling two-thirds of the average income from your fifteen best earning years. And all benefits are indexed to inflation. Sweden has managed to do these fine things without the usual side effects of collectivism. It didn’t invade Poland and France, or send any of its citizens to Siberia. Sweden’s per-capita gross domestic product is a hearty $20,800. Swedish life expectancy is 78.2 years, even if they do call in sick a lot. That’s versus seventy-six years in the United States. And infant mortality is 4.5 per 1,000 live births, compared with the American rate of 6.5 per 1,000. There’s no poverty worth mentioning in Sweden, and no great wealth. Well, there is great wealth, but they play it down. A Volvo limousine is something to see. Seventy- two percent of Swedish households have a washing machine. Ninety-seven percent have a television set. There’s a car for every two adults. The Swedish system works. Except the Swedish system is broken. In recent years the Swedish government’s budget deficit has been as high as 12 percent of the gross domestic product. By comparison, at the end of the Reagan-Bush era, when America’s budget balancers had let all the spinning plates fall on their heads, the U.S. deficit was less than 5 percent of GDP. We in America consider our body politic to be perilously in hock, but the Swedish national debt is, proportionately, 40 percent greater than ours. Sweden’s national debt is nearly equal to its GDP—to all the things made and all the work done in Sweden annually. To get even, the Swedes would have to move next door and mooch off Finland for a year. Just paying the interest on the national debt takes 7 percent of everything produced in Sweden. And this despite the Swedes taxing the hell out of themselves. The tax burden is the highest in the developed world. More than half of the GDP goes for taxes. So living in Sweden is like getting a divorce every April 15—a divorce with dependents. And these dependents never outgrow their need for child- support payments; quite the contrary: The Old Are Youngsters Who . . . , etc. Of an adult population of 7 million, 2.7 million are not working. Most of these people are living off some form of social benefits. Another 1.6 million are employed by the government or in government service agencies. And only 2.7 million are actually paying the bills by working in real businesses. Public spending in Sweden is equal to nearly 70 percent of the GDP, and the Swedish economy is doing about as well as ours would be if seven out of ten of our economic decisions were made by political types. Would you send Newt
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online