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Thats a nice idea but the timeline here is basically backwards.
Sweden started liberalising its economy well before the period of mass immigration you’re talking about. A lot of it came out of the broader liberalising trend of the late 80s and 90s, and the Swedish 90s financial crisis accelerated it significantly. This was the period when Sweden deregulated, reformed taxes, cut spending, balanced the state budget, reformed pensions and introduced things like the school voucher system.
At roughly the same time, migration policy was actually being tightened, despite migration still being comparatively low.
The next major wave of economic liberalisation came under Reinfeldt’s centre-right government, which won in 2006. That government pushed further labour market and tax reforms, and then also liberalised immigration, including the major labour migration reform in 2008 and further liberalisation later on.
That, combined with wars and chaos in the Middle East, helped drive immigration much higher in the following years. So again, the economic liberalisation being pointed to here had already happened before the large migration wave.
And after immigration peaked, the political direction changed again. The centre-left returned to power in 2014, the pace of economic liberalisation slowed considerably, and after 2015 migration policy itself became much more restrictive.
So I don’t really see how the Swedish case supports this argument. The sequence is wrong. Economic liberalisation largely came first, with its ideological baggage arguably even enabling the large wave of immigration that came later.
If anything, the actual chronology points causality the other way.
Interesting, thanks for replying.
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America’s social spending is not an outlier compared to European countries:
European countries are a very diverse basket but countries like France and Belgium have figures of ~30% of GDP on public social spending, 50% more than the US. The OECD fakes the difference with a ‘private social spending’ metric but this is very questionable.
The US’ far higher absolute wealth, far higher growth rate and much higher disposable incomes (compared to fixed costs for many imports that, for example, both the US and Western European countries and consumers rely on) also distort spending; the French don’t cut because they’re structurally incapable of it without the end of the fifth republic; Californian cities can spend $100k a year per homeless person because they’re so rich that they don’t really even have to care.
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American conservatives have an allergy to having the state give money to the poor which they know is going to disproportionately go to blacks. But it certainly didn't stop America's penchant for shoveling money to the Olds through SS + Medicare. It might have even supercharged that to some degree as a replacement for typical socialism. America isn't that much less socialist than the rest of Europe.
Blacks die earlier too. So funneling money to old people would disproportionately favor whites over blacks. If this was not true and SS benefited blacks more then potentially we would have killed SS in the ‘90s and gone to a 401k for all system.
Though Europe does a lot of old people stuff too so I don’t think that’s the driving force.
As a percentage of taxes paid, who gets more from social security, white people or black people?
Social security is screwing over one group in particular, but its not blacks. The group that loses out the most is men in blue collar jobs earning wages near the cap. Low earning women are the greatest beneficiaries.
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