Os nossos keynesianos de botequim apontam para as maravilhas dos escandinavos para dizer que se pode, sim, ter altas taxas e excelentes serviços coletivos fornecidos pelo Estado. Eu, mesmo quando era um keynesiano moderado, nunca achei que o Brasil pudesse se converter facilmente num país escandinavo, a começar que não tínhamos a moderação demográfica, as tradições democráticas, a ausência de corrupção e, sobretudo, a alta educação (e produtividade) dos escandinavos.
Mas, o candidato Bernie Sander acha que sim, que os EUA poderiam ser uma espécie de Dinamarca. Ele só esqueceu de informar sobre os custos de um United States of Scandinavia, e, mais ainda, quem iria pagar...
Mas a principal razão evidenciada por um especialista consultado para esta matéria de Steven Pearlstein é que os EUA não são um país homogêneo como a Dinamarca. Bem, o que pensar do Brasil então?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Wonkbook: Can Bernie Sanders turn the United States into Denmark?
By Steven Pearlstein
The Washington Post, March 14, 2016
Government-provided health insurance. Free college tuition. A $15 minimum wage. Stronger unions. High gas taxes. Guaranteed parental leave. It sounds as though Bernie Sanders wants to turn America into Denmark or Sweden.
“And what’s wrong with that?” the Democratic presidential candidate replied when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked that question.
Indeed, a number of countries with bigger governments, higher taxes and more income equality than the United States are as prosperous, healthy and happy — in some cases, more so. Cross-country studies have found that big government is not a guarantee of a country’s economic success, but neither is it a barrier. Even here at home, the pollsters at Gallup found that most Democrats — and a near majority of all Americans — would be open to voting for a socialist.
According to economists, however, the question is not whether it is theoretically possible for Americans to adopt Scandinavian policies and still be prosperous. The issue is whether Americans would be willing to accept the tradeoffs that go along with such a system — higher taxes and unemployment rates, open trade, slower growth, more income redistribution — and whether Sanders has overestimated the benefits and underestimated the costs of adopting it.
“There’s nothing wrong with it other than that Americans are not Danes,” said Princeton’s Alan Blinder, a top economic adviser to President Bill Clinton.
“The number one reason why these policies are feasible in Denmark is
that the country is extremely homogenous,” explained Jacob Kierkegaard, a
Dane who is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International
Economics in Washington. “The perception among the electorate is that
the government will provide for me and for people who, in a linguistic,
cultural and ethnic sense, are just like me.” And because Danes view
themselves as 'shareholders' in the state, he said, government is viewed
as benign and trustworthy.”
“That situation is not present, nor has ever been present, in the United States,” Kierkegaard said.
Luigi Zingales, an Italian economist now at the University of
Chicago, contrasts high-tax, high-trust socialist countries such as
Denmark and Sweden with high-tax, low-trust countries where populations
are ethnically and culturally diverse, politics are fractious and
government is incompetent and corrupt. In terms of social trust, he
said, the Americans are somewhere in between.
“The danger for the
United States is that it would wind up looking more like Italy and
Greece than Denmark and Sweden,” Zingales said.
Attitudes toward
globalization is another difference. Free trade is so widely accepted in
Scandinavia that it even has strong support from organized labor.
“Their unions recognize that for their workers to have a job, companies
need to export to grow and be successful,” Kierkegaard said. By
contrast, Sanders has made common cause with American unions in
proposing to roll back every trade treaty signed since the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s.
The world, in
fact, may be better off when different countries adopt different
economic systems, argue Daron Acemoglu, Thierry Verdier and James
Robinson in a widely noted paper, “Can’t We All Be More Like
Scandanavians?”
The United States, with its more “cutthroat” form
capitalism, they argue, plays a unique role in the global economy
because it generates a disproportionate share of innovative new
technologies and business practices that are quickly adopted by other
countries. If Americans were to embrace Denmark’s “cuddly” form of
capitalism, they fear, there would be less of that disruptive innovation
and both Americans and Danes would be worse off. A robust global
economy requires the co-existence of both systems trading with each
other.
Although economists are sympathetic to the direction of
many of the individual policies that make up Sandernomics, even those
who lean liberal worry they go too far.
The best example is the
single-payer health plan that would effectively replace today’s private
and public insurance programs with comprehensive medical, dental and
optical services with no co-payments or deductibles for all Americans.
Every other advanced country does it that way, at significantly lower
cost and better health outcomes. Why, Sanders asks, can’t we do the
same?
An analysis done for the Sanders campaign by Gerald Friedman, a
University of Massachusetts economist, concluded that the single-payer
plan would shave $1 trillion off what would otherwise be $6 trillion in
national health spending by 2026, a decade after enactment—even after
extending coverage to tens of millions of Americans who now are
uninsured or underinsured.
The reduction, he calculates would
come primarily from eliminating most of the billing and administrative
expenses at doctors offices, hospitals, pharmacies and insurance
companies—an immediate savings of 12 percent. Additional savings would
come from government bargaining and controls that reduce – and slow the
growth of -- prices for drugs and medical services.
The average
family, Friedman estimated, would save nearly $6,000 a year, even after
paying a new 8.4 payroll tax to the government instead of premiums and
co-payments to insurance companies. At the same time, employers who
offer insurance would save more than $9,000 per employee.
But
Kenneth Thorpe, a widely respected health economist at Emory University,
argues that Friedman overestimated the administrative savings and
reduction in drug prices that the government could negotiate on generic
drugs and home health care, both fast-growing segments. And he said
that Friedman badly underestimated the additional demand for medical
services induced by the total elimination of co-payments and
deductibles, creating the health care equivalent of an all-you-can-eat
buffet.
Thorpe is no stranger to single-payer health plans. His
cost analyses lead Sanders’ own state of Vermont to scrap its plans for a
statewide single-payer system. Sanders’ plan, he calculated, would
require another trillion dollars a year in new taxes on top of the $1.3
billion that Sanders had proposed to fund the system.
Beyond the
financial challenges are the political ones. Health economists predict
the Sanders plan would reduce incomes for doctors, hospital
administrators and drug company shareholders, much as happens in other
countries. Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ policy director, acknowledged as
much but argued that Canadian and British doctors and nurses still lived
“very comfortably.”
Keeping a tighter rein on health spending could also result in fewer
tests and procedures if they fail to meet strict cost-benefit
guidelines, or longer wait times for non-urgent care, which are also
common in other countries. Gunnels said that kind of rationing will be
minimal and, in any case, is preferable to the kind of rationing of
health care that now leaves 60 million Americans uninsured or
underinsured.
Economists have also questioned Sanders plan for free tuition at all public colleges and universities.
Ron
Ehrenberg, a Cornell University expert on higher education, notes that
because of existing federal and state assistance, low- and
moderate-income students already pay little or no tuition. Much of the
tuition benefit, he predicts, will go to students from middle- and
upper-income families.
“I’m not sure this is a wise thing,”
Ehrenberg said. “It won’t affect the ability of lower income students
to get higher education.”
Others predict that the plan could
strain the capacity of public institutions as large numbers of students
shift from private to public colleges. They also warn that the extra
demand probably would ive up the annual cost of the program well beyond
the $75 billion Sanders has projected. A recent study by the bipartisan
Tax Policy Center found that the financial transaction tax which Sanders
relies on to pay for the tuition-free initiative could raise, at most,
$50 billion a year. Setting the tax as high as Sanders proposes, they
warn, would simply cause investors and speculators to make fewer trades,
or drive the trading offshore.
A cornerstone of Sandernomics is a
promise to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour — enough to
lift any full-time worker out of poverty. Other proposals — pay equity
for women, stricter overtime enforcement and rules making it easier for
workers to unionize—are also meant to push up working-class wages.
These regulatory changes would increase average wages by 8 percent
within a decade, according to Friedman at UMass.
Liberal economists auxh A Princeton’s Alan Krueger, former chief
economist in the Obama White House, have long thought that, in modest
doses, such policies can largely pay for themselves because of the
reduced turnover and increased worker productivity that result from
higher pay. But even Krueger has been reluctant to push the minimum
wage as high as $15, calling it a “risk not worth taking.”
In his
speeches, Sanders suggests the higher incomes at the bottom will be
paid for in the form of lower incomes for shareholders and executives
who have captured all of the benefit of economic growth in recent
decades. But even Friedman estimates that about half of the cost of
these wage-boosting policies will eventually be passed on to workers, in
the form of higher prices for what they buy, smaller pay raises or
higher unemployment as firms replace workers with new technology.
Certainly
the most aggressive aspect of Sandernomics is the senator’s plan to
collect an additional $1.6 trillion a year in taxes—the equivalent of 7
percent of GDP. Although all households would pay higher taxes, 40
percent of the extra taxes would come from households in the top 1
percent —those with annual incomes above $500,000, according to a Tax
Policy Center analysis. Those households would see their overall
federal tax bite rise from 34 percent to 55 percent.
Sanders
argues that it is misleading to look at the tax increase he proposes
without also considering the money households would not have to spend on
health insurance premiums and co-payments as a result of his plan. A
study by the liberal-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice found that 95
percent of American households—those with incomes below $225,000—would
have more money to spend on everything other than taxes and health care.
But
Sanders makes no apologies for the dramatic tax increase he wants to
impose on “the billionaire class,” whose after-tax income would fall 40
percent, according to the Tax Policy Center.
For households with
annual incomes above $10 million, the combined income and payroll tax
bite on the last dollar of salary income— what economists call the
marginal rate—would be 77 percent (after adding in the employer share of
payroll taxes, as most economists would do). That compares to 43
percent today. For investment income—typically the bulk of income for
wealthy households—the marginal rate would be 64 percent, compared to 24
percent today. None of those numbers includes state and city income
taxes, which in some places could add another 10 percentage points to
the tax bite.
Even households with incomes as low as $250,000
would face a marginal rate of 62 percent for earned income and 50
percent for investment income, significantly above today’s levels.
For
years, mainstream economists have argued that governments could raise
top marginal rates on salary income as high as 60 percent, and
investment income to 30 percent, without causing high-income households
to change their economic behavior. But with combined state and federal
marginal rates reaching 70 or even 80 percent, they warn, it is likely
that some business executives, hedge fund managers and well-paid
professionals—or their spouses—will decide to hang it up and head for
the beach. For sure they will hire armies of lawyers and accountants to
help them convert salary income to lower-taxed investment income—and
then move investment income offshore, where it is not subject to any
U.S. tax.
“You will just never be able to tax [investment income]
that highly,” warns Princeton’s Blinder, as European countries
discovered years ago. Today, European tax rates on investment income
are now half of what Sanders proposes.
And it’s not just rich
people who would be affected by Sanders’S tax increases at the top.
“Almost any economist would say that those taxes on investment will have
a negative impact on economic growth,” said Len Burman, director of the
Tax Policy Center. “It raises the costs for business of making new
investment, so they will invest less. And it makes investors less
inclined to own [stocks].”
Indeed, it would be surprising if
Sanders’s plan for steep increase in taxes on investment income,
corporate profit and financial transactions did not cause stock prices
to fall significantly, reducing household wealth and, with it, consumer
spending.
Sanders thinks this is nonsense. By redistributing
spendable income to the poor and middle class and increasing government
investment for infrastructure and education, he promises that
Sandernomics would supercharge economic growth. According to Friedman’s
analysis, it would add 25 million jobs over a decade, increase the
income of the average household by more than $20,000 and drive the
unemployment rate down to 3.8 percent.
Even Democratic economists, however, are skeptical of such claims.
Christina
Romer, another former adviser to President Obama, with her husband,
David, released a paper last week concluding that there just weren’t
enough unemployed workers and unused capacity left in the economy to
make it possible for the economy to grow 5 percent each year for a
decade, as Sanders imagines. The more likely result, they said, would be
dramatically higher inflation, not growth.
“A realistic
examination of the impact of the Sanders policies on the economy’s
productive capacity suggest[s] those effects are likely to be small at
best, and possibly negative,” wrote the Romers, both professor at the
University of California at Berkeley. The higher inflation would prompt
the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, further depressing
business investment, they warned. And by providing free tuition to
students and guaranteed health care to everyone, it was unlikely, they
concluded, that Sanders would succeed in greatly expanding the
workforce.
Some economists, such as Jamie Galbraith of the
University of Texas, think the Romers are working from an outdated
economic model.
At a time when there is slow economic growth
because of a glut of savings and too few opportunities for private
investment, shifting money to well-targeted public investments such as
infrastructure and education would surely increase growth, Galbraith
said.
Moreover, in the newly globalized economy, there is a
greatly reduced inflation risk. If wages are pushed high enough,
Galbraith says, there are plenty of students, retirees, stay-at home
parents, under-employed freelancers and Mexican immigrants who could be
lured back into the American workforce.
That, however, is not
what generally happens in Denmark and Sweden. In those countries,
higher wages, free tuition and universal health care come in an economic
package that generally also includes modest growth, higher
unemployment, limited immigration and significantly higher middle-class
taxes. The problem with the Sanders program, say its critics, is that it
promises all the good parts of the Scandinavian model without any of
the bad parts — all dessert, no spinach.
As Denmark’s Kierkegaard
sees it, in the modern world, existing social, economic, political and
cultural institutions are so complex and interdependent that it’s not
possible to bring about radical change in one area without changing
everything else. And even if Sanders did manage to pull off all those
changes, he said, the process would generate disruption and uncertainty
that would slow the economy for years.
“Revolutions in advanced economies are extraordinarily costly,” he said. “That’s why incremental change is preferred.”
Steven Pearlstein is a business and economics columnist who writes about local, national and international topics.
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