Sweden Moving Away From Welfare State

Sweden, long the example of generous government welfare programs, is changing course to a more market oriented, less government controlled plan. It is even reducing taxes. Courtesy of Red State:

Anders Borg[*] has a message for those who look to government to take over health care, rescue the financial system and run troubled corporations: I have seen the future–and it doesn’t work.

As the finance minister of Sweden, Borg is the chief financial officer of a country long known as a walking billboard for a social welfare state. In Borg’s view, the 1970s and 1980s were lost decades for Sweden. Left-leaning politicians pushed government spending, excluding investment outlays, from 22% of gross domestic product in 1970 to 30% in 1980 [even a smaller change that Obama is suggesting]. Real growth fell from an average of 4.4% annually in the 1960s to 2.4% in the 1970s and remained low for the next two decades.

Borg is pushing Sweden in the opposite direction, encouraging the legislature to cut taxes, cap spending and privatize parts of health care.

His government has slashed the tax rate on low incomes from 30.7% to 17.1%. The combined tax take (national and local; income and other) has fallen by 2.5 percentage points in three years to 46.6% of gross domestic product.

Someone give the Democrats the message: their plan has already been tried. It failed. Ask Sweden (or any other European country that tried it...).