YOU'D THINK DEMOCRATS WOULD AT LEAST GET TO BLAIR'S RIGHT, IF NOT CAMERON'S:

Sweden's Turn to the Right (Stanley Reed and Ariane Sains, 9/21/06, Business Week)

[Fredrik Reinfeldt, the 41-year-old leader of the Moderate Party,] a Stockholm native who compares himself to Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, promised to reduce unemployment—officially about 5% but really more like 7.5% due to undercounting—by cutting taxes employers pay on wages of employees, and by trimming income taxes and other disincentives to investment and work.

The conservative coalition would also cut Sweden's current 1.5% tax on wealth above about $200,000, in a move intended to encourage entrepreneurship and even lure wealthy tax exiles and their capital home. Real estate taxes are also likely to be cut. These are all moves that business has been urging for years, arguing that punitive taxes were a threat to the country's competitiveness.

Sweden's tax system is geared "toward stopping wealth instead of stopping poverty," wrote Urban Backstrom, director general of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise and a former Central Bank governor, in the Sept. 18 issue of Dagens Industri, the Stockholm business newspaper.

The idea isn't to dismantle the cherished Swedish welfare state, Reinfeldt explained in an interview with BusinessWeek last year. That would be too controversial. "I saw my party lose election after election on this," he said. Instead, Reinfeldt will reform and update the Swedish model, keeping winning elements such as the excellent educational system. Reinfeldt, for instance, would resume selling off state hospitals to private companies. "To be able to have a welfare state we have to make it more interesting for people to have a job," was how he summed up his approach. [...]

The defeat of the Social Democrats, who have ruled Sweden almost continuously since World War II, will be a boost for right-leaning groups in other European countries, from the Conservatives in Britain to France's interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading conservative candidate for next spring's presidential vote.

Odd that they never mention the implications for our own Democratic Party, which stands in the way of such reforms too.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 21, 2006 7:15 PM