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  1. Sweden Isn’t Socialist
    Townhall.com | January 1, 2019 | John Stossel

    For years, I’ve heard American leftists say Sweden is proof that socialism works, that it doesn’t have to turn out as badly as the Soviet Union or Cuba or Venezuela did.

    But that’s not what Swedish historian Johan Norberg says in a new documentary and Stossel TV video.

    “Sweden is not socialist — because the government doesn’t own the means of production. To see that, you have to go to Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea,” says Norberg.

    “We did have a period in the 1970s and 1980s when we had something that resembled socialism: a big government that taxed and spent heavily. And that’s the period in Swedish history when our economy was going south.”

    Per capita GDP fell. Sweden’s growth fell behind other countries. Inflation increased.

    Even socialistic Swedes complained about the high taxes.

    Astrid Lindgren, author of the popular Pippi Longstocking children’s books, discovered that she was losing money by being popular. She had to pay a tax of 102 percent on any new book she sold.

    “She wrote this angry essay about a witch who was mean and vicious — but not as vicious as the Swedish tax authorities,” says Norberg.

    Yet even those high taxes did not bring in enough money to fund Sweden’s big welfare state.

    “People couldn’t get the pension that they thought they depended on for the future,” recounts Norberg. “At that point the Swedish population just said, enough, we can’t do this.”

    Sweden then reduced government’s role.

    They cut public spending, privatized the national rail network, abolished certain government monopolies, eliminated inheritance taxes and sold state-owned businesses like the maker of Absolut vodka.

    They also reduced pension promises “so that it wasn’t as unsustainable,” adds Norberg.

    As a result, says Norberg, his “impoverished peasant nation developed into one of the world’s richest countries.”

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  4. I’m in Wisconsin, too, Harvey, but somehow I’ve missed out on the bikini team all these years.
    Where can they be found?

    Don’t hold out on me,man! It’s damn cold up here and a guy needs something to keep him warm in January!

    Hope it’s not in Madison, though, cuz I’m not interested in catching Lib cooties.

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  6. With the national debt at over twenty one trillion dollars, and steadily climbing, and the Left’s policy of open borders wherein we welcome as many of the world’s poor and uneducated as can swarm across what was once our national borders, and with the vast majority of them in need of taxpayer funded assistance, and being the major financier of the UN and NATO, and being the world’s policeman, and the major funder of the fight against global warming, (or will be once the Dems take the government back from the Republicans which will happen sooner or later). With all the monetary output the above will entail, I am compelled to ask….how are we going to pay for all our new Socialism?

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