Hey, didn't some really right wing guys get into your parliament recently??
Yeah, the Swedish Democrats. Though they're not exclusively right wing, they combine ideas from the entire spectrum. Infofar as they have actual ideas that is, since just about the only solution the have to any problem is "blame the immigrants!" Currently they only have around 7% percent and haven't really been able to affect any policy in favor of their own program, but there's indication that they may get even more support in the next election.
I suppose I understand. But money, at least indirectly is pretty much the only way government can solve anything. I mean, to take just about any idea and implement it into policy requires money. So even if some deeper soul searching takes place and a government gets to the heart of the matter as to why a thing is the way it is, to fix that problem is still likely to cost money. And government's money all comes from taxes. I do sense what you're getting at, though.
Obviously. The problem is however that it's not "hmm, our schools aren't doing too well. Could it be that there is one, or several, fundamental flaws in how the current system is structured?", but rather "hmm, our school aren't doing too well. How about we give you 10 million extra?".
Whether this is a marketing problem from our parties, or our media only focusing on numbers, or something else, I don't know. But it feels weird when politics only seems to be about adjusting numbers here and there. Though come to think of it, it's not that surprising. The only reason our "right" parties defeated the "left" last election is because they emulated the left so well they basically took over their entire program.
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Yeah, of course there's always going to be a 'ranking' of sorts. The problem is that right now it sucks major nuts to be on the bottom half of the ranking. And not in relative terms...in absolute terms. If you equate not being able to feed your kids to not having a private spaceship, that's your problem.
200 years ago everyone was dirt poor in Sweden. Hell it was pretty bad even a hundred years ago. Since then, thanks to the development of society and most importantly the economic system, we've seen a major increase in well being for all. 200 years ago crops could go bad, you could die of pretty much any disease, you worked most of your life, you got little education and although we had stopped warring with other countries at that point it hadn't been long since the king had forced you to march against the russians. And these people weren't the unfortunate ones, they were the "middle class" of the time
Today, everyone has it better, although the increase hasn't been uniform. Even those at the very bottom don't have to worry about starving to death or dying of tuberkulosis and in theory they can also get an education up to high school. Speaking of Sweden specifically here of course.
Cost too much? Yeah, maybe for very small businesses, but they're not the problem. The problem is the people that already make a million euros a month, but nonetheless fire people because "it costs too much". Who the fuck cares? I think you can afford to make, let's say, 800.000 euros a month instead, and keep those jobs. That's the problem. People don't care a rat's arse.
That's not what I was talking about, although skyrocketing executive salaries are pretty ridiculous at times. But that's not an easy topic to get to the bottom of either.
No what I mean is, is that if you raise the minimum wage, then some professions will simply not make as much money as they cost.
Example: Let's say you have people picking berries in a field. They can pick berries worth 10$ an hour, and you pay them 6$ an hour. This is cheaper than hiring a machine to do it, which would cost 7$ an hour. If the minimum wage is then raised to 8$ an hour, the machine will be the more economical choise, and the workers will be laid off.
This is true for anything, provided you just raise the minimum wage high enough. How great the effect is of course very hard to predict and depends on many factors, but it is there and is something that has to be kept in mind.
We already have that to an extent, but the actual handling of those finances lies in the hands of federal bodies and banks, which are run by people (including stock market speculators). If you could take the human element out of all of that and have financial systems run by computers, then government could become much more efficient and the financial system, hopefully, wouldn't be so rife with corruption and error. The only thing I'd really be afraid of is hackers.
Computers already run a lot of stock market investments, in fact the whole financial sector is incredibly computerized these days. Programs handle a lot of investing and speculation, with humans merely acting as overseers.
But you're talking about a cyberocracy, and without some form of advanced AI that doesn't really solve any of the underlying problems with society except perhaps by speeding up bureaucratic processes.
Politicians and debaters? I'm a bit confused. Like are you saying that government should be outlining how society should be and their plan to get there? Personally, I find that's mostly all politicians do. They speak in rhetoric and idealism to the point where nothing makes sense to me. Few politicians are ever more pragmatic and speak more of how things really are. When they're thinking in numbers and working with empirical facts, this to me is when they're at their best.
What I'm saying is, and perhaps this is a natial difference, politicians often get very nitty-gritty. Should we lower that tax by 1%, should we increase that tax by 2%, should we give funds to that type of school, should this policy make it so bus drivers have to have breaks every 2 hours or whatever. When pressed about why, we may get some nebulous answer about how Sweden is suppoesd to be a land of knowledge to make us competitive in the future.
Take our schools. We have a problem here with quality dropping steadily in the last 10 years (seems like everyone has), but instead of saying "why is there a problem" they say "how much money do we need to fix it?"
I was pleasantly surprised the other week when two politicians in a debate over our school systems really got down to what they think causes our societal problems. It was refreshing and actually provided some insight into the current situation, which was about segregated schools.
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
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Yeah, but you're talking about it from an individual perspective, as in "I got out of that 10% poorest, so screw everyone else".
That's exactly his point though. If YOU get out of the lowest 10%, someone HAS to fall down below you. If everyone in a country is placed on a list, ranking from richest to poorest, then if you go up from 43,003 to 43,002, then whoever was in place 43,002 will not be in 43,003. You will always have a 10% poorest. This gap can be large or small, and moving it in either direction brings with it certain problems. Too large a gap and you create inequality and a privileged elite. Make it too small, for example through higher minimum wages, and you remove potential jobs, because it will cost too much to hire people.
This is the reason why you don't see anyone in Sweden getting paid to wash your car, greet you when you come to the store or pack your bags at the supermarket. You either do it yourself or have a machine do it, because anything else isn't economical. With the minimum wages we have, you simply cannot run those sorts of businesses. I'm not saying that's bad or good, I'm just saying this is how it is. However, move the minimum wage even higher and you will keep on removing jobs that simply cannot be afforded anymore. What will happen then is people won't be able to get a job, so they will instead do illicit work for lower wages, i.e. circumventing the entire system. People are clever, and the more complex and hindering a system, the greater the incentive to work around it unless monitored constantly.
Now in 200 years when the world GDP is 30,000 trillion USD (or something, I just picked a number), there will still be a 10% that is poorer that everyone else, but speaking in absolute terms, they will have more of everything than almost anyone living today. And because they cannot afford a private spaceship and are thus landlocked to Earth, they will be considered poor.
Neither of us is saying that this is inherently something good or something to defend in and of itself. But reshaping the world is complicated, and simply equating wealth across the spectrum is problematic, and may result in worse situations.
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
Supporting big shoulderpads and flashy armor since 2004.
Are you referring to like internet as a public utility? That's becoming a greater issue here in the U.S. where people are wondering if the government should begin to provide the internet the way it does public television and radio and have us pay for it with our taxes. I see both good things and bad things about that.
Don, correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't internet access recognized as a human right in Finland since not too long ago?
First time I heard it it sounded ridiculous, but whether it's true or not, the more I think about it the more I see the reasoning behind such a proposition. With the amount of information relegated to the internet these days, eventually you just won't be able to live a normal life without access to it.
And the thing about nurses, it's very hard to get into nursing schools. The reason why is because there aren't a lot of nursing instructors because there isn't a lot of money in being a nurse instructor at a college. If you have nursing skills you're more likely just to be a nurse, not a nurse educator. And thus colleges have to make nursing applicants be competitive with each other even though so many people who don't make it into nursing school would have easily gone on to be great nurses.
Never thought of that. But it sure explains why there seems to be such a shortage of nurses.
As societies become richer, the poor will always lack the cutting-edge commodities. I personally do not see any way to avoid this, without causing even bigger problems.
Indeed. But isn't this what Sweden (and I suppose Finland as well) are trying to push themselves out of with the massive education we want to give everyone? Fifty years ago you probably never went to high school, nowadays everyone is supposed to have at least a bachelors. I find that politicians, debaters and similar never talk about the deeper underlying concepts of where they want society to head or how to get there, it's all tax number-crunching, but is this the plan? Faced with the everpresent problem of dooming a certain percent of the population to be poor no matter how much we advance technologically, is education the only way we see out of it?
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
Supporting big shoulderpads and flashy armor since 2004.
Don't many European countries enjoy this kind of a system? I know this would never happen in the U.S. Sadly.
I don't know about the rest of Eruope, but we do have such a limit in Sweden. However, it's set to about 2,600 a year. And considering that pretty much everything is more expensive here than it is in the states, that's not quite what Don proposed.
Indeed. The retirement age here is 63, and there's been some suggestions to raise it up to 65, but they've been confronted with utter and total public outcry.
That seems to be the general response pretty much anywhere this is suggested.
Funny how this has evolved. I don't know under which circumstances the age of 65 was decided upon inthe US, but over here the retirement age was set to 65 in a time when people rarely lived beyond 70. So the government figured they could sponsor people's pension until they died. And nowadays people often quit before 65 and live until they're 80... :rolleyes:
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
Supporting big shoulderpads and flashy armor since 2004.
I was proposing the graduated tax rates because I know that those who have more should pay more (maybe 70%< wasn't a good example). I also made it practical to want to advance through societal ranks since, although the higher income brackets pay more overall, they keep more than the last bracket kept so, in theory, they are making money, but they are still giving their fair share.
There is unfortunately also the problem of administrating this in practice. As just as such as system as you propose may seem, it must be possible to actually enfoce it.
A good example of this is Sweden during the 70-80s, during which time the the progressive elements in our taxation were large, specifically for the reasons you cite (although we did take it even further than you originally suggested, since it was actually possible to pay more than 100% tax on the final margins of your income). That obvious problem aside however, it turned out it was very problematic to actually administer.
In theory it sounds great and easy, just make people with higher incomes pay more tax. In practice however people tend to go to great lengths to circumvent such systems. Instead of getting pay raises, employees would get various forms of "benefits". Essentially a higher salary, but one that wasn't taxated. And even today, when Sweden has done away with many of our previous progressive elements, people find clever ways to circumvent various forms of taxation. There seems to be a neverending stream of people who sidestep many of these tax systems in different ways.
Say what you will of the injustice of a flat tax system, but it has the benefit of extreme simplicity. You know exactly how much you're supposed to pay, and the administrative costs drop severely.
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
Supporting big shoulderpads and flashy armor since 2004.
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Obviously. The problem is however that it's not "hmm, our schools aren't doing too well. Could it be that there is one, or several, fundamental flaws in how the current system is structured?", but rather "hmm, our school aren't doing too well. How about we give you 10 million extra?".
Whether this is a marketing problem from our parties, or our media only focusing on numbers, or something else, I don't know. But it feels weird when politics only seems to be about adjusting numbers here and there. Though come to think of it, it's not that surprising. The only reason our "right" parties defeated the "left" last election is because they emulated the left so well they basically took over their entire program.
Today, everyone has it better, although the increase hasn't been uniform. Even those at the very bottom don't have to worry about starving to death or dying of tuberkulosis and in theory they can also get an education up to high school. Speaking of Sweden specifically here of course.
That's not what I was talking about, although skyrocketing executive salaries are pretty ridiculous at times. But that's not an easy topic to get to the bottom of either.
No what I mean is, is that if you raise the minimum wage, then some professions will simply not make as much money as they cost.
Example: Let's say you have people picking berries in a field. They can pick berries worth 10$ an hour, and you pay them 6$ an hour. This is cheaper than hiring a machine to do it, which would cost 7$ an hour. If the minimum wage is then raised to 8$ an hour, the machine will be the more economical choise, and the workers will be laid off.
This is true for anything, provided you just raise the minimum wage high enough. How great the effect is of course very hard to predict and depends on many factors, but it is there and is something that has to be kept in mind.
Computers already run a lot of stock market investments, in fact the whole financial sector is incredibly computerized these days. Programs handle a lot of investing and speculation, with humans merely acting as overseers.
But you're talking about a cyberocracy, and without some form of advanced AI that doesn't really solve any of the underlying problems with society except perhaps by speeding up bureaucratic processes.
What I'm saying is, and perhaps this is a natial difference, politicians often get very nitty-gritty. Should we lower that tax by 1%, should we increase that tax by 2%, should we give funds to that type of school, should this policy make it so bus drivers have to have breaks every 2 hours or whatever. When pressed about why, we may get some nebulous answer about how Sweden is suppoesd to be a land of knowledge to make us competitive in the future.
Take our schools. We have a problem here with quality dropping steadily in the last 10 years (seems like everyone has), but instead of saying "why is there a problem" they say "how much money do we need to fix it?"
I was pleasantly surprised the other week when two politicians in a debate over our school systems really got down to what they think causes our societal problems. It was refreshing and actually provided some insight into the current situation, which was about segregated schools.
This is the reason why you don't see anyone in Sweden getting paid to wash your car, greet you when you come to the store or pack your bags at the supermarket. You either do it yourself or have a machine do it, because anything else isn't economical. With the minimum wages we have, you simply cannot run those sorts of businesses. I'm not saying that's bad or good, I'm just saying this is how it is. However, move the minimum wage even higher and you will keep on removing jobs that simply cannot be afforded anymore. What will happen then is people won't be able to get a job, so they will instead do illicit work for lower wages, i.e. circumventing the entire system. People are clever, and the more complex and hindering a system, the greater the incentive to work around it unless monitored constantly.
Now in 200 years when the world GDP is 30,000 trillion USD (or something, I just picked a number), there will still be a 10% that is poorer that everyone else, but speaking in absolute terms, they will have more of everything than almost anyone living today. And because they cannot afford a private spaceship and are thus landlocked to Earth, they will be considered poor.
Neither of us is saying that this is inherently something good or something to defend in and of itself. But reshaping the world is complicated, and simply equating wealth across the spectrum is problematic, and may result in worse situations.
First time I heard it it sounded ridiculous, but whether it's true or not, the more I think about it the more I see the reasoning behind such a proposition. With the amount of information relegated to the internet these days, eventually you just won't be able to live a normal life without access to it.
Never thought of that. But it sure explains why there seems to be such a shortage of nurses.
Indeed. But isn't this what Sweden (and I suppose Finland as well) are trying to push themselves out of with the massive education we want to give everyone? Fifty years ago you probably never went to high school, nowadays everyone is supposed to have at least a bachelors. I find that politicians, debaters and similar never talk about the deeper underlying concepts of where they want society to head or how to get there, it's all tax number-crunching, but is this the plan? Faced with the everpresent problem of dooming a certain percent of the population to be poor no matter how much we advance technologically, is education the only way we see out of it?
Not for long it seems.
That seems to be the general response pretty much anywhere this is suggested.
Funny how this has evolved. I don't know under which circumstances the age of 65 was decided upon inthe US, but over here the retirement age was set to 65 in a time when people rarely lived beyond 70. So the government figured they could sponsor people's pension until they died. And nowadays people often quit before 65 and live until they're 80... :rolleyes:
A good example of this is Sweden during the 70-80s, during which time the the progressive elements in our taxation were large, specifically for the reasons you cite (although we did take it even further than you originally suggested, since it was actually possible to pay more than 100% tax on the final margins of your income). That obvious problem aside however, it turned out it was very problematic to actually administer.
In theory it sounds great and easy, just make people with higher incomes pay more tax. In practice however people tend to go to great lengths to circumvent such systems. Instead of getting pay raises, employees would get various forms of "benefits". Essentially a higher salary, but one that wasn't taxated. And even today, when Sweden has done away with many of our previous progressive elements, people find clever ways to circumvent various forms of taxation. There seems to be a neverending stream of people who sidestep many of these tax systems in different ways.
Say what you will of the injustice of a flat tax system, but it has the benefit of extreme simplicity. You know exactly how much you're supposed to pay, and the administrative costs drop severely.