two-pot screamer dot com

From Slashdot News Story | Why the IRS Should Automatically Fill In Returns With What It Knows

Re:works fine in Sweden (Score:5, Insightful)

by nanoakron (234907) on Sunday January 24, @01:05PM (#30880020)

Whilst I don’t live in Sweden (I’m in the UK), I have to ask quite what your point is?

The Swedes may pay more in taxes, but in return get free healthcare, good roads, low crime, free schooling and university, (i believe) free (or heavily subsidised) childcare, efficient public transport, and much more.

They’re also very highly rated in terms of their low wealth disparity (road fines for example are based on a percentage of your annual income so that a rockstar in a ferrari feels the same sting in their speeding ticket as does a poor person in a skoda), and human development index.

I could go on. The key point is that nations all make decisions about their priorities – the US believes in waging war and keeping the poor unhealthy and uneducated, other nations do not.

tl;dr – high taxes are worth paying if you get good services in return. Think of Sweden as the ‘Apple’ of nations, versus the ‘Windows Me’ of the USA.

Re:works fine in Sweden (Score:4, Insightful)

by demonlapin (527802) on Sunday January 24, @10:04PM (#30885346)
Homepage Journal

It works in Sweden. The US is not Sweden – the relative cultural homogeneity of the Scandinavian nations is a really crucial part of their ability to conduct welfare states that are not overwhelmed by freeloaders, because that’s the reason that …

[m]ost people who are receiving more money than they’re contributing tend to feel pretty bad about this.

That is not a given in the US. It has been my experience that most Americans I know who are big-government, welfare-state liberals grew up in places where government works. By contrast, most of the small-government, go-it-alone conservatives grew up in places where it doesn’t. Don’t forget that not all governments work…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 8:32 am and is filed under Scrapbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.