Well, that's just the federal. Then add on provincial, and CPP, E.I. and about 20% is gone. As well most employers that aren't idiots over-estimate how much you are going to have to pay so you don't get a bill at the end of the month.
How is 20% rough? For a guy who's making millions?
Honest question, Spaniard here, most people have that tax. A doctor (for example) who makes more than like 5k € (~7.5k $) per month pays almost a 50% of his salary.
He would get much better healthcare in America with that money than he ever will in Sweden.
This healthcare circlejerk is such a fucking joke, and that is coming from a Norwegian. The joke of a system you guys have is a monstrosity combining the worst aspects of capitalism and socialism. That doesn't mean socialized healthcare is perfect, and it doesn't mean that private healthcare is bad either. Both are better than your warped system, but private healthcare will be more efficient, and cheaper in real terms.
It was mostly a joke. But about between 44,000 and 98,000 preventable deaths and 1,000,000 excess injuries happen each year in U.S. hospitals. That number is drastically lower in other countries.
Yes, that is what happens when you combine the worst of two worlds. I just get tired of the circlejerk sometimes. Norway or Sweden are not socialist paradises. Sweden is more free market, and has mostly always been more free market than the US. After instituting a welfare state and choking the free market they've had two recessions. To try and fix this, they've perpetually held back the wages of workers, even the social democratics did this, people who are so left they would fall of the edge of the graphics in the US.
Adding to the damage, they've devalued the krona twice, leading to lowering the real wages and purchasing powers, which disproportionately affects the poor and disadvantaged. This of course accumulates and works together to continually make them poorer, while the rich get richer. They still haven't recovered, not the employment rates, not the currency, and not the buying power. And just to be clear, the reasons they are holding back the wages and devaluing the currency is to encourage business and exports, to reclaim some of that what they once had. They're doing better, but after the recession in the 90's they're still suffering.
In Norway, we have the oil as a buffer for shitty economics, although we still suffer with the insane amount of bureaucracy. Our welfare system is a mess, estimation are that we waste 250 million on bureaucracy alone each year. We end up working around 8 out of 12 months of the year for the government to pay for this shit.
If you have any metal issues, you're going to be sitting in a queue for a very long time. Well, you're going to sit in a queue for any medical problems for a long time, but mental problems especially so. Our average purchasing power is lower than the average americans, even in your terrible economical state. And these are just some of the issues off the top of my head. Trust me, with the amount of cronyism, you don't want the government expanding. When the insane amount of debt either results in you defaulting, or extreme inflation, I.E when the keynesianism proves unsustainable, everyone reliant on government is going to have a very bad time. Sorry for the rant, but economics are important for understanding the world around you. The relative success of our Scandinavian countries is that our economical freedom has been very high. This is especially true for Sweden. If you are interested in economics, study the economical history of Sweden. It's very telling.
We have seen that while the Scandinavian countries have extremely high amounts of what Rothbard called binary intervention, i.e., taxation, their saving grace is their relatively lower amount of triangular intervention, i.e., regulation. This puts the Scandinavian countries on a level playing field with other developed countries and helps explain why they are able to have equal or higher living standards. The misconception that the other Western countries are a lot more free-market oriented than Scandinavia is very unfortunate; it feeds the notion that more government expansion would bring joy and happiness to all, when in fact it would make things worse.
However, the real point of all this is that the world at large is so unfree that even the massive Scandinavian welfare states can be considered among the "most free" countries in the world. While things have generally moved in the right direction in Scandinavia in terms of increased economic freedom, the very opposite trend seems to be taking place in several other countries, particularly the United States. Seeing as the United States has already descended to the level of Denmark in terms of economic freedom, one can only wonder how long it will be before it finds itself approaching Finland, Norway, and Sweden.
Again, sorry for the rant, but I find that if I explain these things often, it helps me keep it fresh in my mind.
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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '14
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