Well, because Norway to a certain extent follows the example of the earliest disciples, and Norwegians are willing to pool our resources, even if it means paying for others getting health care, we pay around 30-36% in taxes.
Wow. Only paying 36% taxes. What a concept (my effective rate is about 50% when all is said and done…and that doesn’t include sales tax).
What’s your guys’ VAT rate?
(If it’s not too high, I might think about moving to Norway…sounds like a tax haven to me
. I might even learn to like lutefisk for a tax rate that low!!!)
Of course, that doesn’t just give us health care should we need it, but also free university education, one year maternal leave, unemployment benefits, welfare, subsidized public transport, and a host of other goodies.
What’s the unemployment rate there?
How does your society deal with the perennially unemployed? (those who are physically / mentally capable of working but stay unemployed) Is there a problem with multi-generational unemployment (i.e., parents who are on social assistance for their life giving birth to and raising children who are also on the dole for the majority of their lives)?
Do you have any cultural strife from immigrants (like they have in France, in particular, or Germany)? How big a problem is it? For that matter, how homogeneous is your society?
How about the history of social welfare: was it implemented to avoid or prevent social strife or was it something that always existed, even prior to WWI?
Do you all have a highly progressive income tax rate or one that is relatively flat? Do you know about what percentage of your population pay no income tax whatsoever?
I ask, because I do acknowledge that the system that you Scandinavians have appears to work
for your culture. Good for you if it does.
One thing that a lot of people don’t know (because its not advertised that well) is that
already over 60% of all our Federal government outlays go to some sort of social service.…that is over 12% of our country’s gross domestic product. 35% of that amount currently goes to providing some sort of health care for beneficiaries. Once Obamacare is fully implemented, the numbers will be even higher. It would be truly scary to think of what that would be if they actually had a universal health plan at no cost to the individual at the time of service, but fully paid for by taxation.
Universal health care, as opposed to the health care reform now passed, where any kind of public option was eradicated by the help of the insurance companies, the GOP, and shamefully, most of the spineless democrats, is Catholic as the OP states. It is a pooling of resources, which is then given to each according to their needs, and if that sounds very much alike that “dreadful” socialism, it is because if you read the New Testament, you will see that the earliest Church was socialist. With the separation of Church and State that exists in the US, the Church cannot take such a role again, so why shouldn’t a democratically elected government?
While “universal health care” is a laudable Christian concept, “Universal Government-Provided Healthcare” is absolutely not. It violates the principles of subsidiarity and participation and actually short circuits the principle of solidarity. It sounds like the dreaded Social Assistance State that JPII discussed in Centessimus Annus, paragraph 48.In recent years the range of such intervention has vastly expanded, to the point of creating a new type of State, the so-called “Welfare State”. This has happened in some countries in order to respond better to many needs and demands, by remedying forms of poverty and deprivation unworthy of the human person. However, excesses and abuses, especially in recent years, have provoked very harsh criticisms of the Welfare State, dubbed the “Social Assistance State”. Malfunctions and defects in the Social Assistance State are the result of an inadequate understanding of the tasks proper to the State. Here again *the principle of subsidiarity *must be respected: a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.
By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.
Or, as our
current Holy Father has said:Solidarity is first and foremost a sense of responsibility on the part of everyone with regard to everyone, and it cannot therefore be merely delegated to the State.
It may work for you all in Norway and I’m happy for you if it does. I don’t understand
why it works in your culture as opposed to elsewhere and that’s why I asked the questions I did above because I am honestly curious. But without some huge cultural shift to transform our culture into one that resembles yours, I simply don’t see such a thing working here. Rather than turning our culture into a more Christian culture, as you claim it does in Norway, I see that JPII’s assessment, copied above, would hold true 100%.
