January 29, 2010, 5 pm, San Francisco City Hall.
I spent three weeks in Scandinavia in late 2009. I’ve been to Denmark several times before (my mother hails from there), so I wasn’t expecting to have any revelations about how different life is there than here. To a great extent, things are quite similar. But there are deep and important differences that I experienced with greater clarity than during any previous visits.
In Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, public transit systems are extremely modern, efficient, frequent and very comfortable, whether inner city subways or intracity train systems. In Sweden we saw no one living on the street and learned that the government was obliged to house each and every Swedish resident, citizen or not. Moreover, if you did not have a job, you qualified for a decent monthly income provided by the state. In Denmark everyone is eligible for practically free higher education, and like Sweden, housing and income are considered social rights. In Norway, a young group of radicals had squatted an abandoned house near the port in Oslo a few years ago, moved out during negotiations with the city government, and eventually reoccupied the building towards the end of their protracted negotiations. The city government finally authorized their presence in the building and set the rent well below market rate in the painfully expensive Norwegian capital. Minimum public-financed income was also the norm there.
How is this all paid for? Taxes! Individuals and corporations pay more than 50% of their income in taxes. But in exchange for these higher taxes, they get free top-notch health care, free university educations, a solid social safety net that includes guaranteed rights to housing and income, and a well-financed and sustainable public transit system.
Americans are notoriously uninformed about the wider political spectrum that exists outside of our borders. In our two-party system, we are regaled with a political spectrum that runs from left (“liberal,” Democrat) to right (“conservative,” Republican) and seems to spend most of its time at the center (“moderate”). But go to Sweden, for example, and you find that none of the dozen or so political parties represented in their national parliament are as far to the right as the liberal Democratic Party of the United States. Our politics has been sliding steadily to the right since Franklin Roosevelt died in 1944, and in spite of much nostalgic enthusiasm for the New Deal, even FDR’s government wasn’t as progressive and lefty as today’s European social democratic regimes.
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