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Norweigan oil fund

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Re: Norweigan oil fund

#161

Post by lordnacho »

buboard wrote: post #73
lnsru wrote: post #28

Wow! These people must be extraordinary to use oil money this way! Not kidding! Never been in Norway, but in countries I have ever been this would be barely possible due to corruption and the needs of the politician’s buddies. Like yachts, private jets, Bentleys and Vertu phones. This $186k/person isn’t far from what average German poses: https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/617492/cd59713c156ad...

Norway was lucky to be a very developed society before oil was discovered. In most countries oil is a curse

I wonder if it's about being developed, vs being about having a high-trust society?

In a lot of places people will immediately get suspicious if you say you're setting up a government fund to hold everyone's money. For the benefit of society, of course.

Re: Norweigan oil fund

#162

Post by vidarh »

punnerud wrote: post #18
thatguyagain wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their income tax is 22% if I'm not mistaken.

Sales tax is 25% (lower on food + public transport). Income tax is close to 50% for most of people (progressive), in addition there is a 14% tax per employee that the companies have to pay. If you take out dividend there is a 25% tax that don't earn you pension.

The top marginal tax rate band is around 50%. Very few people pay that much income tax, or anywhere near it so it's highly misleading most people is near it. A large portion of the population are close to seeing a small portion of their income taxed at the marginal rates because Norwegian incomes are unusually flat and high, yes.

But according to OECD taxing wages 2019, the median tax and social security contribution for a single person with no children in full time employment in Norway is 27.5% vs 23.8% for the US.

Of course the US varies significantly by state.

Sales tax has relatively low impact as you spend a relatively low portion of your income on things taxed at the full rate.

Re: Norweigan oil fund

#164

Post by umeshunni »

mruts wrote: post #146
pytester wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except every other oil dominated country - e.g. Iraq, Libya, half of Africa is more like Venezuela (worse even), than Norway. The oil curse is very real and, for Venezuela, largely unavoidable.

That’s not true, the Saudis do very well for themselves. The entire citizen population is given massive handouts, and it seems to be working out okay. Corruption isn’t very bad, at least compared to other oil states. Also Kuwait is doing good as well, and they have a retarded amount of oil. But, in general, I agree that it often hurts instead of helps. But select countries like the US, Norway, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabi…

I think the difference is potentially that the Gulf countries - Saudi, Kuwait, Qatar etc - benefitted from being able to develop their economies and infrastructure and establish large social welfare systems in the 70s and 80s while their populations were small and oil prices and income were very high.

Here's a chart that shows Saudi per capita income from the 70s: https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=saunygdppcapk...

You can see that their per capita collapsed in the 80s along with oil prices. The royal families in those countries are incredibly corrupt by modern standards, but they have established a system that keeps everyone outside that circle in line with subsidies, religion and threats of imprisonment.

Re: Norweigan oil fund

#165

Post by maxerickson »

jdavis703 wrote: post #108
maxerickson wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be easy to make social security solvent far into the future. There's no shortage of resources to do it, just lack of political will. One step would be to move it away from an insurance model and raise the cap on contributions. Another would be to modestly increase the contribution rates.

If they do raise the cap on contributions people should have the option of either paying more in to social security or paying more into an uncapped IRA or 401(k).

Almost the entire point of raising the cap would be the resulting wealth transfer. Doing it with an opt out wouldn't fix the problem.

Re: Norweigan oil fund

#166

Post by lr4444lr »

dbatten wrote: post #133
cagenut wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't stand this ideological sports-team type of commentary, so just to add some real information and context (after my downvote): Venezuela produces ~70k barrels per person per day. Norway produces a little more than half as much total oil, but with one-sixth the population it works out to ~330k barrels per person per day. An order of magnitude per-capita difference.

While your point about per-capita production is well-taken, I don't think the original comment was intending to score ideological points. It simply said the Venezuelan crisis was avoidable and happened due to mis-management, not that Chavismo is an inherently evil ideology...

Yes, thank you. I deliberately avoided attributing anything to ideology. At the end of the day, both countries are chiefly comparable in having nationalized their oil resources for the public benefit, at least de iure. Also Venezuela was actually doing quite well I believe in 2013 when prices were high. It was a singular failure of their stewards not to diversify the profits.

Re: Norweigan oil fund

#167

Post by kwhitefoot »

mruts wrote: post #134
spamizbad wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America should seriously consider nationalizing its resources and using that money to either fund programs to reverse the trend of its declining life expectancy or at the very least reduce the deficit (and perhaps, one day, bootstrap a sovereign wealth fund of its own)

One of my clients at my old finance firm was Alaska’s oil fund. They do pretty well for themselves and dole out 2k/year in cash to everyone living there. It’s unsurprisingly a very popular program, though I’m kind of morally opposed to a government function like that.

The Norwegian fund is principally for our descendants. The state has a self-imposed limit on how much of the revenue of the fund can be spent each year, the capital is untouched as far as I know. Also what money is spent is spent by the state rather than by individuals; no guarantee that it will be spent wisely of course but a greater degree of likelihood that it will be spent on something of lasting value perhaps.

Re: Norweigan oil fund

#168

Post by fastball »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #151
fastball wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Leaving your career for UBI" is literally the opposite of what UBI is intended to do.

That's what it's always sold for. Instead of staying in soul crushing jobs in order to survive people could pursue new things and be creative.

Right, the emphasis being on "pursue new things and be creative". UBI is generally not intended to allow people to live out their entire lives without doing anything of value for anyone else. And if you're doing things that are valuable to the rest of society, you are paid under capitalism.

So the hope with UBI is that you should never need it for your entire life because you're not making any money at all.

Re: Norweigan oil fund

#169

Post by umeshunni »

mruts wrote: post #134
spamizbad wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America should seriously consider nationalizing its resources and using that money to either fund programs to reverse the trend of its declining life expectancy or at the very least reduce the deficit (and perhaps, one day, bootstrap a sovereign wealth fund of its own)

One of my clients at my old finance firm was Alaska’s oil fund. They do pretty well for themselves and dole out 2k/year in cash to everyone living there. It’s unsurprisingly a very popular program, though I’m kind of morally opposed to a government function like that.

The Alaska Permanent Fund is unsurprisingly popular. To the extent that the state recently voted to cut essential services rather than to cut handouts from the fund:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/us/alaska-university-budg...

Re: Norweigan oil fund

#170

Post by joshspankit »

Scoundreller wrote: post #82
ceejayoz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US produces 10x the oil Norway does, and was producing significant amounts of oil as far back as the 1860s. We've had that profit stream, we just let it get captured by private corporations (or in Alaska's case, given away to garner votes).

I do wonder if Canada could have been like Norway for the same reasons. And Canada has more than just oil. But a lot of it seems to be privately squandered.

Even worse: Canada has actually paid US companies to come take our oil. I feel like all we had to do was charge a very high extraction rate (calculated where 20% of the profit is more than enough to fully restore the ecosystem), have stringent rules in place about pollution, then actively use funds to clean up the environment
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