Science & Technology News

[Lake-Effect]

I'm seeing this inequality/"flat tax" discussion as interesting, but secondary to (and a distraction from) the fact that the places regarded in this thread as being fairer, more equitable, and with a better quality of life for the poorest... collect (and spend) more tax. Period.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

I'm seeing this inequality/"flat tax" discussion as interesting, but secondary to (and a distraction from) the fact that the places regarded in this thread as being fairer, more equitable, and with a better quality of life for the poorest... collect (and spend) more tax. Period.

Well, it's just a different question. I don't think one distracts from the other.

This:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...e_to_GDP_ratio

It pains me somewhat as a libertarian to say this, but the data mostly support what you say. You have to be careful how you say it, though. I think what you can say about this data is:

1. Most of the best societies have high tax burdens (exceptions: Switzerland, New Zealand).
2. But not all high tax burden countries have best societies (UK, Italy, Greece, Croatia, and the tax burden in the U.S. is severely understated in this table because property taxes are not included, which are huge in the U.S. and which are used to fund a lot of activities which are funded out of general tax revenue in other countries).
3. There is no example of a really good society with a really low tax burden.
4. Apropos of the other discussion, none of the best societies have either steep progressive (except New Zealand) or totally flat taxes.
5. And, interestingly, none of the best societies (except New Zealand) have high corporate tax rates.

Conclusion: We don't yet know a way to solve these problems without significant volumes of public spending, contrary to the libertarian dream. Or without a thoroughly capitalist economy, contrary to the "progressive" dream.

[SailOar]

An interesting bit of confirmation bias.


Private Schools Are Indefensible

The gulf between how rich kids and poor kids are educated in America is obscene.

....Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, coined the term meritocracy trap—a system that rewards an ever-growing share of society’s riches to an ever-shrinking pool of winners. “Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone,” he has written in these pages. “In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite.” This is a system that screws the poor, hollows out the middle class, and turns rich kids into exhausted, anxious, and maximally stressed-out adolescents who believe their future depends on getting into one of a very small group of colleges that routinely reject upwards of 90 percent of their applicants....

[newhaul]

Ok I am reading all of this and it occurs to me it has nothing to do with income inequality. It has to do with everyone wanting a comfortable life.

Here are the three things that you will find in successful countries .
The majority of adults will .1) graduate high school. 2) get and hold a job. 3) don't have kids until married. And you will live a decent middle income life.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by newhaul

Ok I am reading all of this and it occurs to me it has nothing to do with income inequality. It has to do with everyone wanting a comfortable life.

Here are the three things that you will find in successful countries .
The majority of adults will .1) graduate high school. 2) get and hold a job. 3) don't have kids until married. And you will live a decent middle income life.

And you are not wrong! Only -- a "decent middle income life" increasingly requires a university degree -- graduating high school is, increasingly, not enough.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by SailOar

An interesting bit of confirmation bias.


Private Schools Are Indefensible

The gulf between how rich kids and poor kids are educated in America is obscene.

....Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, coined the term meritocracy trap—a system that rewards an ever-growing share of society’s riches to an ever-shrinking pool of winners. “Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone,” he has written in these pages. “In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite.” This is a system that screws the poor, hollows out the middle class, and turns rich kids into exhausted, anxious, and maximally stressed-out adolescents who believe their future depends on getting into one of a very small group of colleges that routinely reject upwards of 90 percent of their applicants....

The article is an interesting bit of confirmation bias?


I tend to stay away from The Atlantic, which is a really tendentious, trashy, left-wing rag, totally given over to the post-truth culture wars polarization. For the intelligent left wing point of view, with much greater depth and intellectual honesty, read The Nation. And for perspective, be sure to read some right-wing journalism as well. National Review highly recommended (the right wing equivalent to The Nation), and avoid the trashy American Spectator for the same reason as one should avoid The Atlantic.


I've read both of these publications for decades; my best friend in college ended up as a Nation staffer and I spent a good bit of time in their offices, decades ago, when they were on Park Ave near Washington Square.



As far as private schools are concerned, there is no reason to abolish them. Private schools play a crucial role in providing diversity in approaches to education and access to specialized types of education, and are a bulwark against Sovietization of schools under the monopoly of the state. There is an excellent solution to the problem mentioned in the linked article which is different from abolishing them -- school choice/school vouchers -- which makes it possible for children of all socio-economic levels to access any school they can get into, without regard to means. In the U.S., this is ignorantly considered to be an exclusively right wing project (mostly due to the heavy influence of the evil teachers unions, who are all in for full Sovietization of American education). In the Nordic region, school choice/vouchers are considered a cornerstone of a truly open educational system. Sweden was the pioneer, in 1992, going to a full school choice basis, followed by Finland, and then Denmark, and the idea has spread further in Europe. School choice was implemented in New Zealand even earlier, in the late 80's.



The difference between the Nordic school choice/voucher programs and the ones proposed or partially implemented in the U.S. are important -- all private schools are required to accept vouchers, and vouchers fund 100% of the costs. This guarantees complete absence of parents' financial means in where a child gets to go to school.


Nordic schools aren't perfect, but they are bloody good. The Finnish school system is one of the world's top rated, sometimes considered the world's best. The Swedish school system struggles a bit to integrate the large number of refugees in Sweden (the Finns have far fewer), and produces only average test scores, but is still considered to be among the best in Europe with particular high rating for openness and equality of access.



Private schools are flourishing in the Nordic region. There are 80 of them in Finland.

[Adelie]

The Atlantic is hardly trashy nor is it left wing.

[Midnight Son]

I guess anything Left of Gengis Kahn is considered left.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Adelie

The Atlantic is hardly trashy nor is it left wing.

Have you read it lately? I doubt if you would say this if you had. The Atlantic has changed dramatically over the last four or five years. The Media Bias Chart (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/) puts the Atlantic to the left of the Guardian, and lower for factualness, and I don't think this rating even does justice to what has happened to this publication in the last few years.

The Atlantic is a major platform for Defund the Police, for example, see: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...ionist/613540/. And has been caught using fabricated facts to make the case (the linked article). The Atlantic is also major platform for politicized, unfactual, unreflective writing about the pandemic, and in my opinion has done serious harm to the nation with this. The Atlantic has been involved in numerous journalistic scandals, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/media...ts-correction/. This is a good indicator of extreme tendentiousness of any publication -- when making some partisan point becomes more important than truth and facts. The Shallit scandal is really egregious -- the writer in question had already been caught making up stories out of whole cloth, and plagiarizing other writers. Not only did The Atlantic print some other hogwash from her, it even concealed her identity. This is really egregious. Could never happen at the Nation, which is even more left-wing, but still rigorously honest and factual.


The current Editor in Chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, is notorious for playing fast and loose with facts, most scandalously for inventing stories to justify the Iraq War. See: https://www.salon.com/2010/06/27/goldberg_7/. He is widely considered (from both left and right perspectives) to be a real avatar of what is wrong with American journalism today; read the article in Salon.


A similar thing happened to The American Spectator, over a similar time period. I think what has happened to both of these once-respected publications is a symptom of the general disintegration of our political culture and its descent into post-truth. The once grand Spectator has sunk so low as to be publishing scurrilous nonsense, obvious lies, about stolen elections.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Indeed, and I am glad to be having this discussion with intelligent people However, you are failing to see how this misconception underlies all those studies you've linked to -- they all confound the issue of poverty per se with wealth gaps. Why do you refuse to look at the thought-experiment I posted earlier? I took some trouble with that. It is highly illustrative. I would love to hear your comments.

You're correct. I do fail to see that. Lets take a study that I've cited (or another of equal caliber) and we can discuss your assertion that they they are conflating outright poverty with the income gap that GINI measures.

As to your thought experiement, I just don't see how a contrived scenario is going to be more helpful than actually looking at reality. We don't need thought experiements when we have actual research and data to draw upon.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

No, by "lagging" I mean the poor are not prospering -- they lack opportunity and don't have enough of everything, they lag the broader mass of society.

This IS one of the causal relationships the research points to with a wide wealth gap; a high GINI. Centrating wealth, and therefore power, in a few lead directly to these kinds of diminishing opportunties for everyone else. Lack of social mobility is a direct consequense.

This is all outlined in the research I point to, and you dismiss.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

None of your papers that I could discern are designed to parse this. All of them are based on zero sum game assumptions.

Show me. That's not what I see in the research.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

That's my point, and this failure to see is crucial. The Gini index dumbly measures the diversity of income (incidentally not wealth) in the population. I assert that this is a meaningless metric, for reasons I think fairly powerfully illustrated in my thought experiment. Because the presence of wealthy people does not harm the least fortunate in society; on the contrary, it's a benefit.

I think this is where you are fundamentally wrong, and seemingly unwilling to listen to the actual research. On a whole range of socio-economic factors those that study this stuff find a direct correlation between a widening income gap and an increase in many negative outcomes. You seem to want to dismiss this, but that's not what the research is telling us.

BTW, the definition of the GINI index is (just so we're clear):

a measure of the distribution of income across a population. It is often used as a gauge of economic inequality, measuring income distribution or, less commonly, wealth distribution among a population. The coefficient ranges from 0 (or 0%) to 1 (or 100%), with 0 representing perfect equality and 1 representing perfect inequality. Values over 1 are theoretically possible due to negative income or wealth.

Obviously it on its own is not a very refined tool. No population level measure is. But it does give a measure of the income (and sometimes wealth) distribution across the target dataset.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

It's not the gap between the poor and the wealthy which means anything; it's rather the gap between the poor and the next rungs on the ladder.

Do you not see that there are gaps between ALL rungs, and in high GINI areas those gaps are larger than in small? This is a critical point. It not just the gap between the top and the bottom that is important. It's the range across the whole spectrum. The gap between the uber-rich and the super-rich can be as large as the gap between the impoverished and the those just above the poverty line. The WHOLE spectrum is stretched out. And the effects are felt througout the entire range.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

There you will be able to measure whether a society is either taking care of, or giving opportunity to, the least fortunate. The Gini index fundamentally does not measure this.

A society which distributes wealth effectively produces a lower GINI score. This is exactly the Nordic model.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

See the previous paragraph. There is no mechanism by which the income gap between the top and bottom negatively affects the poor. These two income gaps are mathematically different things.

You are simply incorrect here. There is mountains of research which show this exact effect. I've cited some. I can cite more if you like. Just do a search for "effects of income inequality". Pages and pages...

Originally Posted by Dockhead

...Switzerland is not getting prosperity or even equality from progressive taxation.

No, and I didn't say it was. The point of the comparison was to look at a low GINI country, like Switerland, and compare it to a high one like the USA. The differeing tax systems have little bearing on this. One can have a country with a high GINI and flat, or flattish tax system. And one can certainly have a country with a steeply progressive approach and a low GINI score. I think you are looking for a causal relationship that doesn't exist.

But if you can cite the research that indicates that progressivity in the tax system leads to higher income (or wealth) inequality, then I'd be happy to read it. I've not come across such a thing.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

By what mechanism? This is manifestly not true. This merely assumes the zero sum game. It's not the unequal allocation, it's the LACK of ADEQUATE allocation to the bottom levels, which causes the lack of social mobility. Lack of ACCESS.

Once again, you fail to understand the effect of income/wealth inequality has across the entire spectrum. It's not just a binary choice where you're either on one side of the line or the other. It's an effect that runs through the whole society.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

This is merely assumed. Show me where the data actually says reducing the number of wealthy people will help the lot of the poor. This is manifestly false. Just remove wealthy people and you hurt all of society. See my thought experiment.

My comment is based on simple mathematics of how GINI is calculated. If you lower the top end, or increase the bottom, or otherwise lower the ranges throughout, then you produce a low GINI. Cuba has a low GINI score, not because anyone is wealthy, but because everyone is close to the same low level.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Redistributive? Swiss taxes are anything BUT redistributive. NONE of the happiest countries have steeply progressive, redistributive taxes.

That's what taxation fundamentally is; a redistribution system. As you've pointed out, a flat tax (and presumbly flattish) can collect MORE tax revenue. That revenue is used to provide services to everyone. IOW, it redistributes the wealth.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

On the contrary, the Nordic tax systems are intensely designed to NOT destroy wealth. The welfare state is funded disproportionately by CONSUMPTION taxes; income taxes have very little progressivity, and there are tax breaks for activities which lead to wealth accumulation and and investment. Have you not read any of the links I've provided? One more time:

No tax system is designed to destroy wealth. All tax systems are designed to redistribute wealth.

Looking at actual data:

• Norway gets 30% of its revenue from consumption taxs. It gets 25% from income taxes, another 25% from other social services taxes, and 15% from corporate.
• Sweden gets 28% from consumption taxes, 29% from income, 22% from social services, and 7% from corporate.
• Denmark shows 33% from consumption, 54% from income, 0% from social and 4% from corporate.

For comparison:

• France gets 25% from consumtion, 21% from income, 35% from social and 5% from corporate.
• Japan gets 21% from consumption, 19% from income, 40% from social and 12% from corporate.
• Canada gets 23% from consumption, 37% from income, 14% from social and 11% from corporate.
• The USA gets 15% from consumption taxes, 41% from income tax, 25% from social services taxes, and a paltry 4.4% from corporate.

This does show support for a flatter tax system (assuming nothing else matters). Nordic countries score well on GINI and "happiness" in general. So does Canada and Japan. The USA, as usual, is an outlier on both. France is in the middle. We could add more...

If we compare low GINI countries to high GINI countries what will we find? We know all the lowest GINI countries have some version of progressive tax systems. Some are flatter than others. Maybe there is an optimal "flattness" somewhere.

Personally, I think it's silly to consider the tax system as a stand-alone factor. So much goes into the wealth of a country, and the well being of its people. This is why I think a fixation with the tax system is misplaced at best. But this is where this whole discussion began.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

The wealthy in the Nordic countries pay LESS tax than the middle class as a percentage of income (because of tax breaks on dividends and capital gains, and because of the regressive effect of very large consumption taxes).

Are you saying the median Norwegian, Dane or Swede payes less tax than the median American? Show me. I can't find support for this claim. When I search for info on the tax burden by country I find data like this:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tax-...ited-states-24

https://www.statista.com/chart/19734...und-the-world/

https://tradingeconomics.com/country...ncome-tax-rate

ALL of them list tax burdens heavier in Nordic countries vs the USA.

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Nordic societies achieve happiness not be tearing down the top, but by PULLING UP THE BOTTOM.

You've loaded this sentence. No one is "tearing down the top." There are efforts to try and rebalance the wealth in a society. That is a constant effort that happens in multiple ways.

I must admit, I tire of this back and forth. I can't keep up with your word count, and I feel like we're circling. To sumarize:

I see (and concede) there is evidence for the superiority of flattish (not flat) tax approachs. This does appear to be associated with the best societal outcomes. Is this cause or is it effect. And how much does it really matter? It's not clear from the data I can find.

High wealth/income disparity leads to many pernicious socio-economic-political outcomes. Countries with lower GINI scores have found ways to keep a lid on this problem. It can come through higher taxes (redistribution), or social mores, or even mandates around ensuring people recieve equitable shares of national wealth.

[newhaul]

I can hardly wait for the spring breakup and lifting of all restrictions so we can get back to what's important.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by newhaul

I can hardly wait for the spring breakup and lifting of all restrictions so we can get back to what's important.

I am sooooo with you .

(Except it might be 2022 for me ).

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

You're correct. I do fail to see that. Lets take a study that I've cited (or another of equal caliber) and we can discuss your assertion that they they are conflating outright poverty with the income gap that GINI measures.

As to your thought experiement, I just don't see how a contrived scenario is going to be more helpful than actually looking at reality. We don't need thought experiements when we have actual research and data to draw upon.

This IS one of the causal relationships the research points to with a wide wealth gap; a high GINI. Centrating wealth, and therefore power, in a few lead directly to these kinds of diminishing opportunties for everyone else. Lack of social mobility is a direct consequense.

This is all outlined in the research I point to, and you dismiss.

Show me. That's not what I see in the research.

I think this is where you are fundamentally wrong, and seemingly unwilling to listen to the actual research. On a whole range of socio-economic factors those that study this stuff find a direct correlation between a widening income gap and an increase in many negative outcomes. You seem to want to dismiss this, but that's not what the research is telling us.

BTW, the definition of the GINI index is (just so we're clear):

Obviously it on its own is not a very refined tool. No population level measure is. But it does give a measure of the income (and sometimes wealth) distribution across the target dataset.


Do you not see that there are gaps between ALL rungs, and in high GINI areas those gaps are larger than in small? This is a critical point. It not just the gap between the top and the bottom that is important. It's the range across the whole spectrum. The gap between the uber-rich and the super-rich can be as large as the gap between the impoverished and the those just above the poverty line. The WHOLE spectrum is stretched out. And the effects are felt througout the entire range.


A society which distributes wealth effectively produces a lower GINI score. This is exactly the Nordic model.

You are simply incorrect here. There is mountains of research which show this exact effect. I've cited some. I can cite more if you like. Just do a search for "effects of income inequality". Pages and pages...

No, and I didn't say it was. The point of the comparison was to look at a low GINI country, like Switerland, and compare it to a high one like the USA. The differeing tax systems have little bearing on this. One can have a country with a high GINI and flat, or flattish tax system. And one can certainly have a country with a steeply progressive approach and a low GINI score. I think you are looking for a causal relationship that doesn't exist.

But if you can cite the research that indicates that progressivity in the tax system leads to higher income (or wealth) inequality, then I'd be happy to read it. I've not come across such a thing.

Once again, you fail to understand the effect of income/wealth inequality has across the entire spectrum. It's not just a binary choice where you're either on one side of the line or the other. It's an effect that runs through the whole society.

My comment is based on simple mathematics of how GINI is calculated. If you lower the top end, or increase the bottom, or otherwise lower the ranges throughout, then you produce a low GINI. Cuba has a low GINI score, not because anyone is wealthy, but because everyone is close to the same low level.

That's what taxation fundamentally is; a redistribution system. As you've pointed out, a flat tax (and presumbly flattish) can collect MORE tax revenue. That revenue is used to provide services to everyone. IOW, it redistributes the wealth.

No tax system is designed to destroy wealth. All tax systems are designed to redistribute wealth.

Looking at actual data:

• Norway gets 30% of its revenue from consumption taxs. It gets 25% from income taxes, another 25% from other social services taxes, and 15% from corporate.
• Sweden gets 28% from consumption taxes, 29% from income, 22% from social services, and 7% from corporate.
• Denmark shows 33% from consumption, 54% from income, 0% from social and 4% from corporate.

For comparison:

• France gets 25% from consumtion, 21% from income, 35% from social and 5% from corporate.
• Japan gets 21% from consumption, 19% from income, 40% from social and 12% from corporate.
• Canada gets 23% from consumption, 37% from income, 14% from social and 11% from corporate.
• The USA gets 15% from consumption taxes, 41% from income tax, 25% from social services taxes, and a paltry 4.4% from corporate.

This does show support for a flatter tax system (assuming nothing else matters). Nordic countries score well on GINI and "happiness" in general. So does Canada and Japan. The USA, as usual, is an outlier on both. France is in the middle. We could add more...

If we compare low GINI countries to high GINI countries what will we find? We know all the lowest GINI countries have some version of progressive tax systems. Some are flatter than others. Maybe there is an optimal "flattness" somewhere.

Personally, I think it's silly to consider the tax system as a stand-alone factor. So much goes into the wealth of a country, and the well being of its people. This is why I think a fixation with the tax system is misplaced at best. But this is where this whole discussion began.

Are you saying the median Norwegian, Dane or Swede payes less tax than the median American? Show me. I can't find support for this claim. When I search for info on the tax burden by country I find data like this:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tax-...ited-states-24

https://www.statista.com/chart/19734...und-the-world/

https://tradingeconomics.com/country...ncome-tax-rate

ALL of them list tax burdens heavier in Nordic countries vs the USA.

You've loaded this sentence. No one is "tearing down the top." There are efforts to try and rebalance the wealth in a society. That is a constant effort that happens in multiple ways.

I must admit, I tire of this back and forth. I can't keep up with your word count, and I feel like we're circling. To sumarize:

I see (and concede) there is evidence for the superiority of flattish (not flat) tax approachs. This does appear to be associated with the best societal outcomes. Is this cause or is it effect. And how much does it reall wealth/income disparity leads to many pernicious socio-economic-political outcomes. Countries with lower GINI scores have found ways to keep a lid on this problem. It can come through higher taxes (redistribution), or social mores, or even mandates around ensuring people recieve equitable shares of national wealth.

I agree that we seem to have exhausted this subject. You don't consider or respond to my thought experiment (which I think is extremely significant), nor do you explain in your own words why or how inequality as measured by the Gini Index, as opposed to simply not having enough, produces harm to the lowest levels of society -- you simply post link after link to articles which I find unconvincing, without any exegisis of your own. So we're not getting anywhere here.


I'll only make two minor comments for the sake of good order:


"No tax system is designed to destroy wealth. All tax systems are designed to redistribute wealth."

You are not using the word "redistribute" in the way that I or the scholarship does. "Redistribute" means to take away from some people and give to others. If people pay taxes in the same proportion as they receive services (which does not exist in nature of course) then there is zero redistribution. A profoundly important quality of Nordic tax systems is that they are basically "pay as you go" -- there is much less (obviously not zero) redistribution going on than in most other tax systems. The welfare state does not just cover the poor -- everyone uses the health care system for example, so you pay, and receive. Obviously there is some redistribution from employed to unemployed people, and from rich to poor (as even a totally flat tax will have rich people paying more than they take out), but less so than in our tax systems.



Second, concerning the regressivity of Nordic taxes, especially Finnish ones: The top rate of income tax in Finland kicks in at only €60 500. But passive income like dividends and capital gains attract lower tax rates than earned income. Since higher income people as a rule have a higher proportion of their income from passive income, that means that they are paying less tax as a percentage of their total income, than middle class people, once they are far enough above the top rate. Got it? And the very high consumption taxes add to this effect since higher income people consume less as a percentage of their income, than lower income people do.


This light touch is intentional -- it benefits rich people but it favors investment, enterprise creation, saving vs. consumption. Rich people are further incentivized to accumulate wealth by the absence of any wealth or inheritance taxes whatsoever. The Finns don't care if some people might see that as "unfair" -- they care about society as a whole and see that having rich people accumulating wealth and investing into the economy benefits everyone. It benefits everyone to such an extent that it plays a role in the bottom layers of society being "pulled up", which ultimate reduces even the Gini index, despite the accumulation of wealth at the top.


The Gini Index assumes that reducing or eliminating wealth at the top is just as beneficial as increasing income at the bottom -- I don't see how you don't see how wrong this is.


As to some taxes "destroying wealth" -- some really do intentionally. 90% marginal rates on earned income (which I don't think we see anymore, but which existed in the good old USA once upon a time) destroy those income levels -- people simply won't work to earn salaries which are taxed 90%. Confiscatory taxes of all sorts destroy wealth. Sometimes this is just out of stupidity -- based static analysis of future revenue which does not consider the reduction of economic activity which occurs which you tax anything more heavily. But also sometimes motivated just by envy. Or even out of mistaken idea that just having fewer rich people or making rich people poorer -- tearing down the top -- magically benefits poor people by reducing "inequality". The lack of inequality you see in Nordic countries does NOT come from this kind of destructive levelling -- it comes from pulling up the bottom, and creating vigorous economic growth which provides opportunity for everyone.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Only -- a "decent middle income life" increasingly requires a university degree -- graduating high school is, increasingly, not enough.

I certainly see this in North America; one average income is no longer sufficient to raise a family with, and fewer lower-rung jobs are enough to keep people out of poverty. Yet we still need veggies picked, kids taken care of, hotels cleaned and fast food prepared. Current solution is immigration and migrant workers (legal or otherwise).

How is this handled in the Nordic countries you are familiar with: higher minimum wage? More support for the working poor?

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

I certainly see this in North America; one average income is no longer sufficient to raise a family with, and fewer lower-rung jobs are enough to keep people out of poverty. Yet we still need veggies picked, kids taken care of, hotels cleaned and fast food prepared. Current solution is immigration and migrant workers (legal or otherwise).

How is this handled in the Nordic countries you are familiar with: higher minimum wage? More support for the working poor?

Incorrect the increased burden of paying for that college. Makes it unreasonable for several years

You can go to a trade school for 2 years and come out with a certification that can get you a 75k a year job right out of the gate.
And no college loan debt.