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The American Dream Is Alive in Finland

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Re: The American Dream Is Alive in Finland

#141

Post by fleitz »

dalke wrote: post #135
fleitz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol. Please tell me more about how Nordic people never established any colonies. The countries that made all the colonies are Nordic colonies in and of themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normans

Sweden had colonies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_overseas_colonies . Sweden also had slave trade. Denmark/Norway had colonies as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_colonial_empire . Greenland and the Faroe Islands are what remain of the Danish colonial empire. Finland is another Nordic country, though not a Scandinavian country. Finland has never had an empire. It was too busy being controlled by Sw…

> Fourth, the Normans are only one link in history. Why stop with them? The Normans come from the Norse. The Norse are Germans. Why not simply say it's all due to German colonization?

You could well say that... but I'm not sure how it makes the assertion true that nordic countries/people didn't have colonies. It's actually something that I've picked up on from my studies of history that many colonizers derive from Germanic roots. (My hunch which I can't prove / haven't investigate much is that the germans picked up on it from the romans)

I didn't mean to suggest that there's only one kind of colonization, I'm actually a huge fan of the idea that there are many types, and that some of them were beneficial.

Also, I don't really buy into the idea that colonization was responsible for the success of the nations that did the colonizing. I think that the exploitative type of colonization was harmful to development of the economy just as slavery in the Southern US lead to widespread poverty when compared to the North.

Yes, that was an absolute statement which you disproved handily, not all colonies were created by nordic / germanic peoples.

The very language we are communicating in is a testament to the colonization of England (or whatever the fuck it was called before it was colonized) by Nordic/Germanic people/countries. It's a colonization similar to America by Britain, where the colonists decided to give the middle finger to the motherland, similar to the way the English just gave the finger to their original colonizers in Denmark.

https://www.englishclub.com/english-language-history.htm

Re: The American Dream Is Alive in Finland

#142

Post by jazzyk »

adventured wrote: post #121
jazzyk wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>America: one of the highest median household disposable incomes on earth. 25% higher than Norway, 30% higher than Germany and 50% higher than Sweden. Careful here... You need to subtract: - cost of health care (even if you are a W-2 employee, you still have to pay, typically 30% of the cost, self-employed people may end up $25K/year for a family of 4) - cost of higher education - $250K/child for private college, $!2…

> cost of higher education - $250K/child for private college, $!20K/child state college US households have better balance sheets than most highly developed European nations. So that's obviously not making the impact that people would like to claim it is. The median student loan for all people with student loans, is a mere $13,000. > cost of health care I agree, that's why the US has such low taxes on the middle class…

>The median student loan for all people with student loans, is a mere $13,000.

= The student loan debt is close to 1.3 TRILLION in 2016, almost TWICE the credit card debt (already substantial at 700 BILLION)

= With a delinquency rate of ~20% (compared to 2% in real-estate)

= The class of 2015 graduated with $35,051 in student debt on average, the most in history.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-growing-student-lo...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/student-loan-delinquencies-decli...

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/credit-card...

Re: The American Dream Is Alive in Finland

#143

Post by jazzyk »

ajmurmann wrote: post #29
adamnemecek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that the Nordic model can't scale?

Having moved to the US from Germany, not a Nordic country, but a country with a much tighter social net that works comparatively well, I agree that it probably wouldn't work in the US. I think a social net works best if there is enough empathy in society to keep people happy with paying for those who need the net as well as keeping people from exploiting it too much. Of course there will always be someone unhappy wit…

I am in the US and I would be happy to chip in to help pay for health expenses of a poor person, who has no family, etc.

What I am NOT willing to do, however, is pay enormous overhead to the the insurance/healthcare/bill-processing complex which sucks out the blood out of this country.

I bet most people in the US object not to some kind of a social contract to help the less fortunate, but to the completely broken system.

Re: The American Dream Is Alive in Finland

#144

Post by adamnemecek »

jazzyk wrote: post #143
ajmurmann wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having moved to the US from Germany, not a Nordic country, but a country with a much tighter social net that works comparatively well, I agree that it probably wouldn't work in the US. I think a social net works best if there is enough empathy in society to keep people happy with paying for those who need the net as well as keeping people from exploiting it too much. Of course there will always be someone unhappy wit…

I am in the US and I would be happy to chip in to help pay for health expenses of a poor person, who has no family, etc. What I am NOT willing to do, however, is pay enormous overhead to the the insurance/healthcare/bill-processing complex which sucks out the blood out of this country. I bet most people in the US object not to some kind of a social contract to help the less fortunate, but to the completely broken sys…

> I bet most people in the US object not to some kind of a social contract to help the less fortunate, but to the completely broken system.

I feel like there is quite a few who are fundamentally against the idea.

Re: The American Dream Is Alive in Finland

#146

Post by tzs »

wila wrote: post #117
bloodorange wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is no excuse for a death sentence. Many cyclists do this in the Netherlands too and in the period that I have lived there, I haven't seen them treated that way on the roads.

If a car hits a cyclist or pedestrian in Holland, the car is -by definition- at fault. See [1] link in dutch. Free translation of the first part: Cyclist or pedestrians are seen as the weaker traffic participants. Because they are fragile in traffic the law has a special rule on collisions with a motorized vehicle. The driver in the car is responsible for the damage of the cyclist without his guilt having to be prove…

It looks like the driver does have the possibility of proving that he was not guilty, and if successful limiting his reponsibility to half the damages: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/strict-liabili...

Re: The American Dream Is Alive in Finland

#147

Post by prostoalex »

jazzyk wrote: post #116
adventured wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about: America: one of the highest median household disposable incomes on earth. 25% higher than Norway, 30% higher than Germany and 50% higher than Sweden. America: owner of 45% of all global private wealth. America: half the unemployment rate of the EU and Eurozone. America: a higher median income than Finland, with half the unemployment rate. Finland I'll note has been in a soft-depression for nearly a decade,…

>America: one of the highest median household disposable incomes on earth. 25% higher than Norway, 30% higher than Germany and 50% higher than Sweden. Careful here... You need to subtract: - cost of health care (even if you are a W-2 employee, you still have to pay, typically 30% of the cost, self-employed people may end up $25K/year for a family of 4) - cost of higher education - $250K/child for private college, $!2…

One man's high cost of health care is another man's high salary opportunities in healthcare and pharma industries. Becoming a US-certified doctor is the golden ticket in many medical schools around the world.

Re: The American Dream Is Alive in Finland

#148

Post by dharma1 »

cesarbs wrote: post #100
dharma1 wrote: post #83

Finn here (though lived the past 12 years in the UK). In my experience, the one thing that by far works best to enable social mobility, and that I think Nordic and some central European countries have done quite well, is free, high quality education - from primary school to university. Especially as we move further and further to knowledge based economic growth, this is crucial, not just for social mobility, but well…

Curious: how hard is it for people to get access to free university education there? My home country - Brazil - offers free university education, and actually our federal universities are the best in the country. While there are quotas for certain socially disadvantaged groups of people (e.g. racial quotas), the sad reality is that regular seats are taken mostly by rich kids whose parents can afford to pay them prep…

Depends on the subject you want to study - as the govt pays for education the policymakers influence the course sizes to funnel students towards subjects they deem beneficial.

It can be difficult to get in, sometimes too much so, people try multiple times. But the education and the degrees themselves in return are very high quality - many universities in the UK take in almost everyone and the degrees don't really teach the students that much.

There are almost no private colleges in Finland so I haven't seen the phenomenon you describe.

Re: The American Dream Is Alive in Finland

#149

Post by dharma1 »

nickff wrote: post #99
dharma1 wrote: post #83

Finn here (though lived the past 12 years in the UK). In my experience, the one thing that by far works best to enable social mobility, and that I think Nordic and some central European countries have done quite well, is free, high quality education - from primary school to university. Especially as we move further and further to knowledge based economic growth, this is crucial, not just for social mobility, but well…

There is a great deal of information (in studies and research) that shows post-secondary schooling is a good investment for the individual, but that does not mean that increasing the average amount of schooling is good for the country. A number of people are now making the argument that greater 'educational' achievement is mostly just signalling status, intelligence, socialization, and work ethic, not actually teachi…

I think that is very country specific, and depends on the quality of the education too.

Educating scientists and engineers (and other valued professions, like teachers who all have higher education) definitely improved the productivity of Nordic countries - and allowed them to build high tech industries relatively quickly.

Re: The American Dream Is Alive in Finland

#150

Post by ptaipale »

jakub_h wrote: post #67
jomamaxx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

32% national, 22% municipal and 8% social security = 62%. 20% payroll tax. 24% VAT. That it is 'common' does not mean it is fair. If a company has $100K allocated to pay you, $20K goes to payroll tax. Of $80K remaining, you take home 40% of that, which is $32K. Suppose 2/3 of your take home goes towards consumer goods meaning that you're paying an additional $5K on VAT ~= $25K direct take home. So for $100K salary, y…

You only pay 32% of average income tax if your income is approaching infinity. So your post-tax income is approaching infinity as well, you have more money than you could ever need, and so does everyone else, because your taxes sponsor other people. Welcome to utopia! :D

That 32 % is the state tax, but municipal etc taxes are on top of that.

Realistic example of where I live: if gross salary is 100,000 €, the employer pays around 120 k€ (including payroll taxes) and the take-home pay after taxes is 57,610 €.

So the employee gets a little less than half of what the employer pays.

(>100 k€ is the bracket of top 1.6 % of employees.)

There's a handy calculator at the tax office pages: http://prosentti.vero.fi/VPL2016/Sivut/LaskennanTulos.aspx?k...

The nominal percentage however excludes social "insurances" which are effectively taxes.

Overall, taxation is very simple for a regular employee; typically the pay-as-you-earn system takes your taxes during the year and in next February you get a slip detailing the income of last year. Most years I don't need to file a tax return at all because the PAYE system has done it correctly. There are very few deductions to apply.

There are some other items where taxes are noticeably higher than in the US. Gasoline costs around 1.35 €/l (5.66 $/gal).

General VAT is 24 %.

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