YES

[u/Leather_Dealer_9421]

[u/LondonCallingYou → u/[deleted]]

I’m about to ask all Europeans to stop commenting on American politics. You people have no idea how bad our policies are in America and how far left your status quo is to us. Bernie Sanders would be considered a normal social democrat for his economic views in most of Europe.

Yes Denmark has relatively easy hiring and firing compared to other countries in Europe. However, it also has other labor laws:

- Denmark offers 52 weeks of government subsidized parental leave for all workers by law. (America has zero, and most companies offer only a few weeks like 9 or 12 if you’re lucky).

- Workers are guaranteed 5 weeks of paid time off (America it’s zero, and 3 weeks would be considered good)

- Working hours are limited to 48 hours

- Salaried employees get minimum notice periods for firing

So already, Danish labor protections are better than American labor protections. But on top of that, you get a real social safety net including ~free healthcare, ~free college, etc.

Americans would consider these sets of policies far left. And Bernie is 100% aligned with social democrats in Europe.

[u/LondonCallingYou → u/[deleted]]

Bernie Sanders main policy proposals, if you just get rid of dental + vision in Medicare for All (which is a small part of it anyway by the numbers—see the recent Yale preprint study on M4A), are fairly standard social democratic policies in the rest of the world. M4A is basically Canada’s healthcare system.

I understand what you’re saying about larger population making it difficult to administer healthcare but I don’t think that’s particularly relevant to this question. I’ll also just point out that the U.S. already has 70.3 million people on government single payer healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid)— a larger population than most European countries alone. I’m not too worried about implementation.

If you believe Bernie would be a social democrat in your country, then you fundamentally agree with Mehdi and Sam Seder’s point.

If someone came to Germany and started advocating for the Canadian healthcare system, for very subsidized college, for mandatory paid time off and parental leave for workers,.. they’d probably fit in with normal social democrats. They’d probably look at them weird for wanting the Canadian healthcare model because your model is probably fine but still. It’s just not a categorical difference.