http://www.heritage.org/Index/Ranking.aspx

As for the gasoline, well, my math could possibly be off but my calculations show an equivalent domestic gas price of about $4.82 / gallon. Obviously a lot of that is the gas tax.

As for taxes in general? Income about 40-45% on average. Sales tax is 25% VAT. Employer’s fee ~30%. Those are the major ones.

It’s a long since established fact what this does to private saving, investment and growth.

This American Thinker article, which I have linked to before, has some interesting data regarding Sweden:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/02/economics_evidence_and_enlight.html

You’ll need to scroll down past lots of Tea Party photos to get to Clayton’s remarks about American Indian reservations. His analysis goes beyond government policy to include a few points that would be interesting to discuss.

Getting back to Myhaf’s invitation to L-C to write a post about Sweden’s welfare state…
I have a question about the funding for their plan. I believe that the Swedish government has a sizable income from natural gas or oil, and that they wisely invested this income so that it provides much of the money needed to fund their social welfare programs. (I may be mistaken, and it might be some other Scandinavian country, but my point is the same even if it’s not specifically Sweden’s practice.) Thus, Sweden apparently handles its money much more responsibly than American politicians can claim. Furthermore, American politicians have and are doing everything possible to prevent us from accessing our own oil supplies, so we not only can’t satisfy a bigger percentage of our own energy needs and benefit from sales to other countries and good-paying jobs for Americans, our government also doesn’t receive substantial amounts of money in taxes and fees that they could be using to pay for stuff on their wish list. I hope that L-C will include some information about how Sweden funds their generous welfare benefits. Readers of this site all agree that welfare programs are detrimental to people, individually and collectively, but is Sweden also bankrupting the country to pay for it?

As interesting as the discussion might be, though, I am compelled to add that I do not believe our government should be using income from oil or any other source to fund a welfare state, and it certainly shouldn’t be looting the American public for generations into the future to do so. Sweden should stand as a warning for avoiding a welfare state, not as a role model for how to do it with somewhat better fiscal responsibility. But then, I am one of those hard-core limited government types.

Asking for more concretizations of welfare-statism via Swedish experience is, to me, like asking the dog next door what its like when he gets kicked in the ribs by his owner. My owner kicks me quite hard enough, thank you. I don’t need further details to grasp what rib-kicks are all about. And, they make it’s tough to dodge the kicks, because they string the wires of your cage very close together.

In the meantime, PowerLine today reprinted a long extract from Swedish journalist Paula Neuding on events surrounding the riots that greeted Israel’s Davis Cup team in Malmo last week. Here are just two paragraphs that describe the welfare state in Sweden:

“But Rosengård lies in the world’s most generous welfare state. Those who cannot provide for themselves and their families have a right to social welfare, which according to Swedish law must cover the cost for food, clothes, shoes, leisure activities, health and hygiene, health care and medicines, a daily newspaper, a phone, living expenses, electricity, commuting to work, home insurance, membership in a workers’ union and unemployment insurance. The frustrated and angry youngsters in Rosengård get health care at a minimal cost, free dental care, free school, and free college and university education, with the right to student benefits and loans. Social inequality is, therefore, a poor model for explaining not only a rise in crime the neighborhood has seen in the last few years, but also in political radicalization.

“This way Rosengård not only stands as a monument over the once so egalitarian ambitions of the Swedish Social Democracy. The neighborhood has also become a symbol for the fact that too many of the country’s Arab immigrants have brought anti-democratic values from their home countries; values that neither “dialogue police” nor the world’s most generous welfare system has been able cure. And it is also becoming a symbol of a Western country that is prepared to compromise with those values.”

Please do read the whole PowerLine post (http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/03/023053.php), and add a note here endorsing Myrhaf’s invitation to L-C.

I am familiar with this topic and could describe it at length and in detail. The is “knowing” it, and of it, and then there’s “having gazed into its abyss”.

“The White House says its goal is simple “fairness.” That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution.”

For Obama and his ilk, the only difference between “redistribution and “retribution” is the “dis”.