Ladies and gentlemen, this is an endangered species:
According to Rush, we must save our ABBAs, lest they become refugees. Bear in mind that Rush is no "long-haired maggot-infested FM-type environmentalist wacko". He once said "if the owl can’t adapt to the superiority of humans, screw it". So it is touching to see his concern for disco-era Swedish supergroups.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I grew up in Sweden. I spent the first 22 years in Sweden. I've been living here for 30 years. Sweden is about to do the same thing, trying to tax the upper income, and as a result of that, they left. I lived there when Bjorn Borg and the pop group ABBA was there, they all left. So who will get stuck with paying the bill? It's the middle-class people of Sweden. So we get stuck paying the bill because nobody else could do it, and as a result of that we have always had a sales tax of 26% because there's no other way. If you can't tax the person any more, you have to go after everything else.
RUSH: Right. I'm well aware of it, the Swedish example, the Swedish experiment with ABBA pulling out of there.
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: And then you had, like you said, Bjorn Borg pull out of there.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: And a number of others. Well, even U2.
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: They came out of Ireland and the UK.
CALLER: I mean, there's no way you can --
RUSH: (laughs) All these great philanthropists. Yeah, but, see, how long did it take for that to show itself or to reveal itself for the people who lived in Sweden, remaining to pay the taxes? Once they raise taxes on everybody and they started doing an Atlas Shrugged in Sweden, how long did it take before the people who were remaining to pay tax in Sweden realized they got screwed?
CALLER: Well, it didn't take long, and as a result of that, we had privatized medicine or people becoming doctors, have to pay their own money to get health care.
RUSH: Oh, why, how cruel is that.
CALLER: I know.
RUSH: How cruel! People had to pay their own money to get health care.
CALLER: I know.
RUSH: Oh!
CALLER: And on top of that we had to pay our taxes to pay for the nationalized health care. So we paid on top of that, then if we wanted to have our own private doctor, we had to pay privately for that. So that's why I'm not so afraid. I think the American people will never put up with this and once they found out that we all are going to get stuck with the bill, everybody in the United States.
RUSH: I think you're right about that, Monica. I really do. What worries me is how long it's going to take them to realize it. There's going to be a lot of suffering before they figure it out. There are going to be a lot of Bjorn Borgs and ABBAs leaving the United States and leaving the freight to be paid by the so-called beneficiaries of all of this. I want to forgo the suffering, I want to... This is not necessary; it is not a fix. It's something entirely different. If it's going to take Obama voters four, eight years to figure this out, that's going to be a lot of pain, a lot of economic decline, and a lot of ground to make up down the road.
Unsurprisingly, this little snippet is chock full of lies. It is true that Sweden has the highest personal income tax rate in the world and a VAT (not a sales tax) of roughly 25%. They have a relatively low corporate tax rate coupled with zero costs to businesses for health insurance which provide strong incentives to businesses. Despite the high taxes, most people are happy to pay them:
But for most Swedes paying high taxes is a benefit, not a problem. 'I am very happy to pay high taxes because I know I am getting value for the money later on,' says Valentina Valestany, a 39-year-old legal adviser. She is especially pleased with the school her daughters Westa, 15, and Anastasia, 13, attend. 'Lunches are free, it was no problem getting in. My daughters receive a very good education and they have great teachers.'
Nicholas Aylott, a 38-year-old British lecturer, is working as a political scientist at Stockholm's Södertörn University College.
'If you start talking to someone in Britain, you can be fairly sure that they will end up saying that taxes are too high. In Sweden, you can't do the same,' he says. 'Most people trust the state to manage taxes well. There's a broad, deep faith that the money going into the welfare state will be employed usefully.'... And Swedes are well provided for. Year after year Save the Children puts it at the top its league of countries where it is best to be a mother; the country is sixth on the UN Development Programme's human development index (the UK is 16th); and Unicef ranks it second in its table of child wellbeing in rich countries. Maybe Sweden proves that it's worth paying high taxes.
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There is no evidence of an exodus of the wealthy. Three members of ABBA still live in Sweden. In fact, Bjorn Ulvaes recently won a $12 million dollar judgment against the Swedish tax authority. Bjorn Borg still lives in Stockholm where his very successful clothing line is based. Swedish law allows people to set up various tax shelters to collect their royalties.
As for the Swedish health care system, it is heavily decentralized, with most of the responsibilty at the county and city level. And it is highly effective:
The life expectancy of the Swedish population continues to rise. In 2005 the life expectancy was 78 years for men and 82.8 years for women. This can be attributed to falling mortality risks for both heart attacks and strokes. A little more than 5 percent of the population is 80 years or older, which means that Sweden has proportionally Europe’s largest elder population.
...
Costs for health and medical care amount to approximately 9 percent of Sweden’s gross domestic product (GDP), a figure that has remained fairly stable since the early 1980s. In 2005 care and services provided by the county councils, including the subsidization of pharmaceuticals, cost SEK 175 billion (USD 25.4 billion)(or about the cost of 3 months of the Iraq war - B.I.). Seventy-one percent of health care is funded through local taxation, and county councils have the right to collect income tax, the average level being 11 percent. Contributions from the state are another source of funding, representing 16 percent, while patient fees only account for 3 percent. The remaining 10 percent come from other contributions, sales and other sources.
Most county councils use some form of purchaser–provider system, in which a council negotiates compensation agreements with health care units – for example, performance-based compensation determined by diagnosis-related group (DRG), that is, a system to classify hospital cases into one of approximately 500 groups expected to have similar hospital resource use. This allows hospitals to become more independent of political bodies. In some cases hospitals have become corporations owned by the council. It is now more common for county councils to buy health care services – 10 percent of health care is financed by county councils but carried out by private health care providers.
The fee for staying in a hospital is SEK 80 per day. Fees for outpatient care are decided by each county council. Fees to consult a primary care physician range from SEK 100 to 150. An appointment with a specialist will cost more. To limit costs for the individual there is a high-cost ceiling, which means that after a patient has paid a total of SEK 900, medical consultations in the twelve months following the date of the first consultation are free of charge. A similar ceiling exists for prescribed medication, so no one pays more than SEK 1,800 per twelve-month period.
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Prior to 2005, access was a huge problem but since then, if you have to wait more than three months for surgery, the local council will pay to send you anywhere to have the surgery.
I think our ABBAs, whoever they may be, are in no danger of extinction. While this is far from the most egregious lie Rush has ever promulgated, truth is clearly not one one of the conservative "principles" that Rush keeps going on about. The example of Sweden also proves Rush's bromides about the "Nanny State" false.