Private credit is supposed to be people taking risks with business ideas and investments, and if it doesn’t work out, they pay the piper. But, Private equity is using insurance companies to take advantage of laws meant to bail out insurance companies to make it so the public is still on the hook for their risky investments. If the investments go well, private equity keeps those gains, if the investments go poorly, they offload the losses on an unwilling public.
The CATO Institute’s index that people use to say how capitalist Norse countries are includes mostly things that have nothing to do with distinguishing capitalism from modern democratic socialism.
Even looking at the economic freedom indicator, only four percent of it is looking at the state’s ownership of assets, which is core to what socialism is.
Yet, this is used again and again to say how capitalist these countries are.
In the US, the state owns around 4% of total national wealth, for Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway, this is: 11.2%; 24.1%; 31.7%; and 57%.
There are many different types of Socialism. Just determining that a country isn’t a fully topped down planned economy, doesn’t mean it’s not Socialist.
Low-wage workers in the US pay HIGHER taxes than the Nordic countries if you count healthcare premiums as taxes. Healthcare premiums come right from your paycheck and go a bureaucracy that pays for healthcare. It’s the same in the US as Nordic countries, except in the US it goes to a private company and in Nordic countries, it goes to the government. In both cases. health insurance is provided…except out of pocket costs are also lower in the Nordic countries.
If you need a family plan, then the US average wage worker also pays more!
The focus on taxes is silly. What matters is what are the cost burdens on Americans. Whether it is a tax from government or a healthcare premium from an insurance company, it’s a burden! Only looking at taxes is highly misleading, especially when taxes are instead of a premium, so when you look at the US, you ignore the cost of that premium.
That the US is a larger country, means we have more economies of scale, meaning it should be easier for us to provide healthcare for its people. We don’t do it based on ideology.
The problem with childcare fraud in Minneapolis wasn’t simply a problem with Somalis, but with private companies providing government services while being paid by the taxpayer. That wouldn’t have happened if the government did it itself.
The Nordic countries have universal welfare states and high levels of state ownership. They are examples of more successful “socialist” policies.
Trump policy has made the paperwork requirement of welfare much higher, leading to people who qualify to not get the benefits. It’s more difficult to be poor under Trump policies.
Trump’s tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy do not sunset. His financial benefits for the middle class and below do sunset. If he really thought these programs were good and were helping people, he and the Republican Congress that passed them would have made them permanent, instead, he made them temporary to use as an election issue.
Trump Accounts mostly benefit those wealthy enough to take advantage of them as tax deductions (ways to avoid paying taxes, making the deficit, debt, and inflation worse).
Anytime the government does something through tax deductions instead of checks, it’s a sign that it will mostly benefit the wealthy.
Liberalism should be for the freedom and opportunity of the individual, and focus on harmful concentrations of power in government, business, institutions, and culture.
When companies got rid of an old CEO and for the first time got a new one that had an MBA, wages fell. It looks like the ideology of the CEO matters. If the CEO believes in standard business school teachings that suggest businesses should lower wages if they can, then they do it, and people get paid less.
At the lower range of the wage scale, businesses have so much leverage over workers that they can suppress wages under competitive market rates. Because of this, an appropriately priced minimum wage doesn’t hurt employment, and actually increases it because more people are willing to work for that higher wage and they are less likely to quit.
The increase in wages results in higher prices and lower profits. The higher prices do not cancel out the wage growth with inflation because only a minority of the cost of all the goods and services people buy are from people who make near the minimum wage.