Hey, danes - what's up with your country? Are you starting to give socialism a bad name just when USA is almost done creating a socialist welfare state of our own?
40 percent of its adult population live on government transfer income, full-time, all-year. A little more than a third of these people are pensioners and the rest are working age. About one third of the people who actually hold a job work for the government or government-owned companies. The effective tax level is around 70 percent. (180% tax on cars on top of the regular 25% sales tax?!)
It seems you cannot get much more egalitarian that that while still out of uniform.
But:
Today, fewer than 50% of all women 30 years of age are married compared to 91% in 1960.
The Danish Statistical Yearbook 2002 shows reported crimes from 1935 to 1960 to be stable: about 100,000 crimes per year. But from 1960 until today, the number of crime reports has increased by 400%, to more than 500,000 per year.
And if we look at violent crime, the picture is even grimmer. The number of violent crimes in 1960 was approximately 2,000; it is approximately 15,000 today. This is an increase of more than 650%, and seems to be rising steeply.
The population size has remained unchanged at around 5 million.
This is a very surprising development. Welfare state advocates often say that crime is caused by poverty. Well, Denmark has become about twice as rich per citizen during this period of rising crime. Another argument is that poverty is caused by economic inequality. Well, Denmark has engaged in the most comprehensive income redistribution program of any nation. Denmark is the most egalitarian country in the world today.
So, a rising crime level is the last thing the welfare statists might have predicted using their own theory. Maybe there is some other independent factor causing the development? Denmark has taken in a great number of immigrants and refugees from third-world countries. These immigrants unfortunately are greatly overrepresented in the crime statistics—something like 5 to 1—but they only account for less than 10 percent of the population, and hence cannot account for the entire increase in crime.
What gives? Are you taxing too little?
How about the higher education? According to the report "Education at a Glance" from the OECD, 15 percent of people between the ages of 25 and 64 has a bachelor degree or more in Denmark. In the U.S.A., it is 26 percent—nearly twice as many.
I will be the first to agree the the quality of that education may not be good for the majority of the US graduates, but I am talking not about quality here but about the ability to afford it.
Many people believe that if education were not provided by the government, only rich people could afford it.
In U.S. public (government) funding of especially higher education is not nearly as readily available as it is in Denmark. How come more americans can afford it? Or do danes just not want to study?
If we look at the other end of the education level, those with only 9 years of education, in Denmark it is 34 percent, whereas in the U.S. it is 14 percent. Again the numbers are much more favorable in the U.S. How come?
Is that a reasonable explanation: "In Denmark, many people are prevented from gaining the education they would like. All higher education is publicly run and free. Central planners decide how many doctors, architects, engineers, lawyers, economists, etc., that society needs. Students are rationed according to their grades in high school. If your grades are not high enough, you may not begin a degree program of your preference."
What about health? Denmark is one of the few OECD countries where the average life span has hardly increased since the early 1970s. In the early 1970s, Denmark was at the top in OECD comparisons; today it is closer to the bottom.
According to the politicians, this has nothing to do with poor quality at the Danish hospitals or long waiting lists for examination and surgery. They say it is due to the Danish people's habit of smoking and drinking. And yet, often one can read in the news stories of people who die preventable deaths simply because they were on a waiting list and unable to get care.
It was recently proposed by one of the three economists from the Danish Economic Council that if young people in Denmark wish to move abroad after they have completed their education, they should first have to pay back the costs of their education. Only when they have paid enough taxes to cover all the expenses of their education, would they be able to move abroad without having to pay the government first.
Thus do we have proposed the social-democratic version of the Berlin Wall, an economic barrier to prevent emigration so that the state can continue to tax people. That does not seem like a measures a happy country would even consider.
Are things really that close to unraveling? I know the basic sound econnomic theory have predicted just that but I always believed that the famous abcense of corruption and very robust work ethic of danish people would continue to propagate the system for quite a while yet.
miko
