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Obama Needs Socialism Lesson

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By JOHN HERBERT

From Where I Sit

Published: November 9, 2008

Welcome, comrades, to the "new" USSR — the United States Socialist Republic. That's the direction leftist President-elect "Robin Hood" Obama will nudge us in over the next four years.

Consider all his socialist campaign rhetoric about redistributing income and raising taxes. Will his threshold fornew taxes be$250,000, $200,000, $150,000 or even $120,000? We'll see.When, pray tell, did higher taxes ever create more jobsand lure the unemployed back to work?

I've lived and worked for 35years in socialist Sweden, long the highest-taxed nation in the West. So, I have a fair idea what socialism can and can't do for you and me.

Sweden provides universal government-backed health care — it isn't even an option; it's compulsory. That sounds comforting — until the day you might need access to that "free" care. The current waiting time for hip replacement surgery in Stockholm, the Swedish capital, is 16 months. It's "only" 13 months to see an urologist.

How about 18 months for transplant surgery? A little less is the norm for heart-bypasses. That was no consolation to one of my former bosses. Despite a long history of heart trouble, he was sent home from the hospital to wait his turn for bypass surgery. He died waiting.

Another patient, in her late 70s, was the victim of Swedish selective surgery. She was simply told by her doctor she was too old for surgery. She was juggling blood-thinners, instead, when she died. Government-employed doctors were playing God.

Her GP, by the way, wasn't even Swedish; he was from the mysterious Orient. Swedish doctors and nurses, looking to advance their careers and pad their savings accounts, flee abroad as soon as the ink on their licenses is dry. Only those Swedes with little incentive stick around to do research and to award Nobel Prizes.

Bedside manner is clearly lacking in Swedish medical care. My wife spent a month fruitlessly trying to convince ob-gyn doctors in Sweden she had miscarried. When she eventually delivered a still-born child, she was assigned to a ward for eight — all the others were eagerly, even happily, awaiting abortions.

My wife's first hospital meal was blood pudding — pig's blood pancake with flour and all-spice — a popular bit of Swedish home cooking that resembles placenta. Playing God again, a nurse asked my wife, "What have you got to be upset about? You've already got two kids."

My personal favorite is, after three months in the hospital, being released with an appointment for a routine follow-up exam by the chief neurologist sixth months later. When I kept that appointment, her straight-faced reaction was, "Uh, you? I thought you'd be dead by now."

Education is also free in Sweden, paid in part by a 65 percent income tax on Barack Hussein Obama's favorite people, the middle class. Our kids were good students by Swedish standards; their grade schools praised them as "average."

Competition, in any form, is de-emphasized in Swedish schools. Our kids, and their anxious parents, too, were actually lectured on the evils of competition in so-called "formative" years.

Suddenly, after nine years of compulsory but non-competitive education, the young teenagers (and their parents) were told they would have to compete for high-school entrance. With no such thing as school vouchers in Sweden, our kids at least won tickets home to an American high school.

Social security pensions are guaranteed to every Swede, regardless of work record. Most, of course, shell out both payroll taxes and other contributions. But, preparing the annual budget for my department in an average Swedish company, I had to add 45 (!) percent in employer fees to the payroll. That was over and above the employees' ordinary withholding tax.

Now, there's an incentive to cut employees, if there ever was one. Indeed, excessive and non-competitive employer taxes and fees were key factors in Sweden's losing its world-class paper-and-pulp, shipbuilding and iron-and-steel industries altogether. Other majors, like furniture-chain IKEA and packaging giant Tetra-Pak, re-grouped offshore.

Amidst all its social welfare programs, though, Sweden has ironically (and successfully) farmed out its pension funds to be managed by private enterprise. No one has ever complained or, probably, even noticed.

Nobody noticed, either, when Sweden's relatively-new non-socialist government recently decided (after roughly three generations of cradle-to-grave welfare) to shoot Santa Claus, to cut both personal and corporate taxes to boost employment. Sweden's death tax was eliminated three years ago; America's remains at 45 percent.

The inexperienced president-elect should put Sweden on his list of "must" countries for his first fact-finding mission abroad. Sweden has, at last, found out how to compete globally — by slashing taxes to stimulate growth. Let's hope Obama comes to the same conclusion.

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert now lives in Spring Hill.

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