Det Wårm En Tinglerer Føelens

Liberals pine for Denmark and Sweden.

You can hear it from their politicians – Bernie Sanders is one of many that visibly palpitates for the “Danish system”.  And you can see it in their semi-offical propaganda; in the cable series Weeds, produced by the loathsome Jenji Cohan, Denmark is depicted as a civil utopia.

Or, to be accurate, Sanders and Cohan depict a version of Denmark (and by extension the other northern European welfare states) that existed in in mid-seventies.

As Kevin Williamson notes, history is yet again leaving America “progressives” behind:

For those of you who are keeping score, the Heritage Foundation, which literally keeps score, rates Denmark’s economy as slightly more free – slightly more capitalistic — than that of the United States. Denmark is in a rough spot just lately, but it has been undergoing a series of deep and intelligent reforms to its welfare state (as have many of the other Northern European countries) to counteract the ill effects of earlier excesses.

Williamson also notes that the Danes, like the Swedes, pay for the goodies with a fairly crushing level of middle-class taxation – something that no American Democrat has the guts to admit; apparently we’ll have to pass their version of socialism to see what it costs us.

25 thoughts on “Det Wårm En Tinglerer Føelens

  1. Tsk tsk tsk Mitch; always with the shit sources.

    The Heritage Foundation wills anything the right wing big money that funds it pays it to say. It is not a valid or factual source.

    Hell, even the right wing Cato institute is more reliable than the shit Heritage Foundation. Do your damn homework!

    The reality is that while, yes, the Scandinavian countries have high taxes, they have very successful economies, and they have MUCH higher taxation on the wealthy. Their middle classes do quite well, in spite of the taxation rate, because they are well governed, and have free elections untroubled by right wing voter suppression OR voter fraud. Not a lot of gun violence, apart from of course that right wing nut crazy fringe conservative Anders Brevik, the aberration that proves their success in contrast to our cultural gun failure. They have better health, better education (no revisionist history, creationism or other crap), better infrastructure, etc.

    If you look at the costs, in terms of taxation, you also have to look at their benefits more accurately — for example low national debt, something the right likes to use to fear monger as they increase that debt without paying for it:

    “The IMF data shows that Australia has the lowest level of gross debt, after Chile, when compared with other member states in the Organisation of Economic Development and Co-operation (OECD). In terms of net debt, only Chile, Denmark, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden have lower levels.”

    I would argue that net debt is the more significant here.

    You cherrypick. That is dishonest. You use crap sources. That is a combination of lazy, sloppy, and dishonest. And you promote deliberately deceptive right wing propaganda. Tsk tsk tsk

    Your readers deserve better, but then your readers come here perhaps because they are avoiding and denying those facts you opt not to promote. So, yes, American Liberals are perfectly willing to be honest about what we should pay for and what we should be getting for it — something other than a rapidly increasing wealth and inequality that is far more crushing to our Middle Class than anything Scandinavian.

  2. Yes, Eurosocalists fund their utopia with very high taxes on the middle class, and very minimal national debt to deal with. They are also mostly white and ban late term abortions. So all we have to do is:
    Raise taxes on the working middle class by several times over
    Get rid of deficit spending
    Kick out the Mexicans
    Ban later term abortions
    Get Canada to take care of our national security

  3. DG,

    Kevin Williamson is a good source; he is a solid journalist who uses good credible sources.

    You are a “shit” source. You parrot “progressive” chanting points, and do them without logic, discernment or, lately, much grace. Nearly everything you’ve ever disgorged into this space has been debunked – and bear in mind that among my regular commenters we’ve got a few MDs, a rocket scientist, a couple lawyers, a few engineers, and some other people who actually have to show they know what they’re talking about for a living.

    Glad we could clear that up.

  4. To paraphrase Tolstoy, every centrist is alike; every extremist is extreme in his or her own way.
    And that’s why Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump will not be elected. If you move very far from the center, for every extremist that you pander to and make happy, there will be 5 unhappy extremists who will come out to vote just to defeat you. The Democratic party doesn’t have a left wing; it has a dozen of them, and most don’t think highly of the others. The same applies to the Republican right.

  5. It seems that lately Dog Gone has learned a new word.

    I can only assume she thinks that peppering her comments with “shit” will make them more persuasive.

    I would contradict her, but I struggle to find a way her comments could be less persuasive.

  6. Personally, I’m quite sure ds is as expert at breeding with German Shepards as any of us are in our respective professions.

  7. You know Mitch, ds’s little sink hole has 2 regular readers; ds and teh Peevee, and not even Peevee sees anything cogent enough to comment on.

    You’d think she would take a lesson from that, but then you’d be giving her credit for an intelligence that she is not even intelligent enough to dream of.

  8. You know, I’m as big a fan of vulgarity and profanity as anyone. I’d bathe in it if given the chance. But, when DG attempts to use it, it’s like a screeching bullhorn where you look and think “No . . . just . . . no.” And then she peppers it with the kind of sentence structure that would make Hemingway weep.

    The Heritage Foundation wills anything the right wing big money that funds it pays it to say. It is not a valid or factual source.

    What does that mean? What the FUCK does that even mean? My six year old talks more coherent than that, with a wad of peanut butter toast in his mouth.

    Everything that follows after that is just a big pile of flaming buttholes. You’ve grown so tiresome, you’ve had to resort to typing “shit,” which is, admittedly, what you’ve always been typing but, it doesn’t work for you. Nothing works for you.

  9. always with the shit sources.

    this is another fine exemplar of the St Olaf education!

  10. It is not a valid or factual source.

    DG,

    Did you ever take a logic course at Saint Olaf?

    I’m guessing not.

    Read this before writing any such drivel ever again, and reconsider your entire approach to arguing about sources.

    Heritage is most definitely valid. Whether any given thing it says is “factual” or not is something you get to convince us of on a point by point basis.

    They taught us this at humble little Jamestown College (not to mention Jamestown High School, in my dad’s writing class). You’d think Saint Olaf might have mentioned it.

  11. Europeans living in Sanders’ preferred social democracies make less money than Americans, live in smaller houses, drive smaller, crappier cars, pay more for food and shelter, etc.
    And no, it won’t get better for them eventually. The GDP growth of the European social democracies is significantly lower than the GDP growth of the United States.

  12. MBerg wrote: Heritage is most definitely valid

    Most of the ideas behind Romneycare and Obamacare came from the Heritage Foundation as a response to the proposed Hilarycare in 1993-4.

  13. Bullshit, Emery.
    The 94 Heritage healthcare study was a minor, one-off bit of hypothetical research. It was never a serious proposal.

  14. So if we’re citing Heritage as an authoritative source on Obamacare, then it’s not a “shit” source, then?

    And Heritage proposed the individual mandate; NOT the repeal of the free market or the backdoor to socialization.

  15. Live by Taranto, die by Taranto:

    For most purposes, “20 years ago” is a close enough approximation for 23. In this case, however, it gives the lie to Butler’s claim that Heritage first embraced the individual mandate as an “alternative” to President Clinton’s “universal health care plan.” Bill Clinton became president more than 3½ years after the monograph’s publication.

    http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204369404577211161144786448

  16. Heritage puts out all kinds of policy papers. It is what they do. That’s why it is called a think tank. The idea that Heritage “invented” Romneycare or Obamacare is looney. An “individual mandate” for health insurance is so frikkin’ obvious no one should be credited with “inventing” it.

  17. MBerg: I believe you’re describing DG’s claim. As an aside; I’m not a particular fan of the Obama or many of his policy choices.

  18. So DG, it’s nice to see you advocating for very high and regressive consumption taxes. It’s good for everyone to have some skin in the game, as it stands now in the U.S the bottom 50% or so of wage earners pay little to no income tax. Two other things to factor in-Many of those northern European countries have lower corporate taxes, but the big one is that they spend very little GDP-wise on military budgets. Why? Because the U.S. is doing most of the defending there since the end of WWII.

  19. jimf wrote:
    Because the U.S. is doing most of the defending there since the end of WWII.
    That was in the pre-Obama era. These days the NATO countries are pretty much on their own. These days, I bet the Frenchies are glad that they have their own bomb.

  20. Its possible Norway could be demographically similar to Minnesota, but certainly not to Mississippi and since the FBI confirms that races commit crimes at different rates, that demographic difference matters. And since it matters, the proposed solution won’t work without taking it into account, which liberals never do. So this solution won’t work. Because it’s based on the wrong facts.

  21. In Hawaii there are a lot of ethnic Japanese. They comprise maybe 15% of the population, but they occupy most of the important positions in the civil service and elected government. We also get a lot of Japanese tourists. I’ve heard that the Japanese tourists think that the local ethnic Japanese are very odd. They have a word for it, I can’t recall it, that basically means a person has a Japanese face and name but isn’t really Japanese. Many of the local Japanese are descended from Okinawans, who aren’t “really” Japanese. The language they speak, which they think is Japanese, is antique. Their manners aren’t quite right.
    I think that Norwegian tourists might feel the same way about Minnesotans of Norwegian descent.

  22. Oh yeah, now that I think of it, the word that describes a person who looks Japanese and has a Japanese name, but isn’t Japanese is “matsu” or “kino”-something. The root word means “pine” or “wooden”. It means you’ve got a wooden head.

  23. As usual, EmeryTheAntisemiticSoci@list gets schooled. Let’s see if he admits his use of talking points re Heritage were wrong. Nah, being a braindead libturd means never having to say you are sorry. Just look at DG’s write and run modus operandi.

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