Sweden: Lessons for America?

[vt]

http://www.freetochoose.tv/program.php?id=sweden

[dcarrigg]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

http://www.freetochoose.tv/program.php?id=sweden

When you name your website URL something like "freetochoose.tv," I already know what you're going to say about Sweden. No need to watch it.

It's like wondering what the Walmart corporate training video's take on unions is going to be. No need to bother to sit through it. You already know their angle.

[vt]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

You might want to study the history of Swden since 1970. It clearly shows why they reversed course in 1979.

Welfare states can work with everyone paying a 60% income tax and pension reductions in bad economic times. Why don't you ask lower and middle income voters if they
want to pay 60% income tax rates, and public unions if they want pension reductions. Yet this will be necessary without economic growth.

PBS is showing it at 7 tomorrow evening.

You might want to check this out too:

https://blexit.com/

[dcarrigg]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

You might want to check this out too:

https://blexit.com/

Yikes. What utter ahistorical hogwash. As if the southern strategy never happened. Next they'll be saying the south fought to free the slaves and Lincoln was a champion of property rights.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

Yikes. What utter ahistorical hogwash. As if the southern strategy never happened. Next they'll be saying the south fought to free the slaves and Lincoln was a champion of property rights.

https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/stat...39803038617601

[vt]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

That twitter page coming up as "does not exist"

[dcarrigg]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

It's because Candace Owens blocked Kevin Kruse. Basically it was a historian explaining why everything on her blexit site is a lie. Guess she's not up for the criticism.

[swgprop]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

Twitter thread here for those interested: https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/stat...65284110704640

[vt]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

The Klan and Nazis are despicable criminals. The Klan especially has killed well over a thousand blacks.

The only valid report I found of whites being killed by the Klan were the two along with one black killed by the Klan
in Mississippi in 1964.

It seems Owens was using an article from a Montgomery, Alabama newspaper. I have no way of verifying this.

However Owens and Kayne West, along with other blacks are conservative, and trying to recruit other blacks to
leave the Democrats. It is a fact that Trump recieved more black and hispanic votes that Romney. It will be interesting
to see how blacks and hispanics vote this election, as well as 2020.

As I've stated before I don't like either party. I do believe in free markets, not autocratic anything. "Autocratic" is a code word
to paint a position. Nothing is autocratic in the U.S.

What is wrong with the video about Sweden? What is not factual in the program?

Sweden went socialistic briefly, the move was a mistake. They then went back to free markets but also kept the high level of benefits,
such as free education and health care. However Swedes agreed to have everyone pay 60% taxes, even lower income individuals, to pay
for this. What is wrong with everyone paying their fair amount? The economy benfits because a market economy allows greater econimic growth
and good jobs.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

However Owens and Kayne West, along with other blacks are conservative, and trying to recruit other blacks to
leave the Democrats. It is a fact that Trump recieved more black and hispanic votes that Romney. It will be interesting
to see how blacks and hispanics vote this election, as well as 2020.

Of course he did. Romney is a mormon white-bread character--one part Mr. Burns, one part Flanders. But maybe you're getting out over the plate a little bit here. Trump won a higher percentage of the black vote. But I'm not sure he won more black votes overall. This was true no matter what color Democrats were. The big lesson of 2016 is that millions of people stayed home rather than vote for Hillary. She was not a terribly inspiring candidate. Folks from either party would do well to remember that.

Anyways, facts still matter. Even many Conservatives will not buy this nonsense. Soldiers. Officers. People who are not flaming liberals. Lies and distortions will gain you ground with some folks, especially those who listen to nothing but Alex Jones and Fox News all day. But not the better educated ones. Someone smart enough to get through West Point or Annapolis is probably not going to fall for this type of manure. Nor will the nearly impossible supermajority of black folk who vote against the GOP (can you imagine if 90% of white Americans agreed on anything?). GOP once had that supermajority. They were the party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, after all. But by Hoover's second run, they lost even the simple majority. And by Goldwater's run, the supermajority went against them. Probably something to do with being against the Civil Rights Act. Turns out when you run a presidential campaign on the idea of legalizing segregation, you don't get the black vote. Weird, right? In fact, an easy and useful heuristic in American history, regardless of party, is to assume the black vote runs opposite the southern conservative white vote. And they say voters are irrational...

[dcarrigg]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

PS: If you had to ascribe one negative trait to Yankees, stupid probably shouldn't be your first choice. The north didn't win the civil war just to have a president abolish the 14th amendment by executive order. We all know why this is happening now, during election week. And we will remember.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

This thread seems to be focused on unsustainable govt debt caused by being too generous to the people (like Sweden).

So this seems like a good place to talk about the municipal bond market, where cities go to borrow the cash they use to build overly plush cities and pay overly generous pensions and wages.
Recall that in 2010 Merideth Whitney predicted a bloodbath in muni defaults. Here's a quote:

...You could see 50 sizable defaults," she said. "Fifty to 100 sizable defaults. More. This will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of defaults."..

It never happened. Nor did the much predicted collapse of the PIIGS economies due to excessive debt.
It seems that fears of socio-economic collapse caused by too much govt spending never really materialize.
In contrast, real people get to enjoy nice cities, high wages, and good pensions, in real life as a true observable fact.

Valenzuela and Argentina offer examples that reckless spending can indeed be taken too far and the economy run into the dirt.
But I am less concerned about high debt levels than I once was, the apocalypse never arrives.
I don't worry about Sweden, or Germany, or Canada suddenly going bust because they bought too many schools, or they paid hospital bills for millions of sick people.

[jk]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

the theory that deficits don't matter [as famously stated by dick cheney] is beginning a severe test. foreign cb's have ceased buying u.s. treasuries, and the cost of currency hedging is such that no foreigner can make money buying treasuries with nominally higher returns than those of their home countries.

the u.s. is about to discover what it is like to have to cover our own debts. this explains the "dollar shortage" which has been emerging, the rise in libor, the squeeze in the eurodollar market. for the moment it is causing a significant rise in the value of the dollar, as various entities must obtain them to pay dollar denominated debt.

however, the u.s. treasuries borrowing is squeezing out private borrowing here. and those treasury borrowings continue to rise [about $1.3trillion in the fiscal year just concluded iirc- this with record low unemployment and supposedly economic growth?!]. add the growing tsunami of entitlement costs of the aging baby boomers and i think we should start a pool on when the u.s. deficit reaches $2trillion. [the fiscal year that ends oct, 2020?]

the only "solution" to this will be the fed monetizing the debt. the value of the u.s. dollar will fall 30% [according to dalio] to 50% [look at '85-'85]. this will be a great boon to export industries assuming we're not still in a trade war with every other country on earth. and this will cause the cost of imported goods to skyrocket.

so i think we've got a bout of serious inflation coming down the road. in this way, our debts will indeed matter.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

This thread seems to be focused on unsustainable govt debt caused by being too generous to the people (like Sweden).

So this seems like a good place to talk about the municipal bond market, where cities go to borrow the cash they use to build overly plush cities and pay overly generous pensions and wages.
Recall that in 2010 Merideth Whitney predicted a bloodbath in muni defaults. Here's a quote:



It never happened. Nor did the much predicted collapse of the PIIGS economies due to excessive debt.
It seems that fears of socio-economic collapse caused by too much govt spending never really materialize.
In contrast, real people get to enjoy nice cities, high wages, and good pensions, in real life as a true observable fact.

Valenzuela and Argentina offer examples that reckless spending can indeed be taken too far and the economy run into the dirt.
But I am less concerned about high debt levels than I once was, the apocalypse never arrives.
I don't worry about Sweden, or Germany, or Canada suddenly going bust because they bought too many schools, or they paid hospital bills for millions of sick people.

On the surface of it, it makes sense, doesn't it? If there are banks too big to fail, obviously there must be countries TBTF too. Especially with the US, with a couple hundred trillion in land and mineral rights alone, not to mention 11 air craft carrier groups and a nuclear missile stockpile to back it up, who'd come collecting and how does one imagine Uncle Sam wouldn't be good for it. If anything, it's more likely that a US treasury default happens just because Congress doesn't feel like paying than because Congress is unable to pay.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Sweden: Lessons for America?

On the surface of it, it makes sense, doesn't it? If there are banks too big to fail, obviously there must be countries TBTF too. Especially with the US, with a couple hundred trillion in land and mineral rights alone, not to mention 11 air craft carrier groups and a nuclear missile stockpile to back it up, who'd come collecting and how does one imagine Uncle Sam wouldn't be good for it. If anything, it's more likely that a US treasury default happens just because Congress doesn't feel like paying than because Congress is unable to pay.

That fits nicely with jk's comment above regarding baby boomer pensions and healthcare. In 1983 Ronald Reagan's Greenspan commission raised FICA taxes; raised retirement age; and delayed COLA increases for seniors, creating a 2.6 billion surplus to pay for the boomers. The surplus is still on the books but Congress borrowed the 2.6 trillion dollars surplus.

One can say US treasury bonds are the safest investment in the world, and that's what the Social Security Administration has in it's hand. Some folks call the US bonds "worthless IOUs", but nobody on Wall Street says that when they sell me a bond fund. As a practical matter the congress does not want to pay that money back to retire the bonds; that would involve real pain.