O que distingue a Noruega dos demais nórdicos é o fato de possuir uma vaca petrolífera, que está sendo muito bem ordenhada, ou seja, estocando leite para dias menos leitosos...
Cobram quase metade da renda em impostos, para oferecer educação pública gratuita de boa qualidade. Mas não são estatizados como muitos pensam no Brasil, e sim absolutamente empresarias e competitivos.
Possuem uma pequena população, estabilizada desde várias décadas, um sistema praticamente infenso à corrupção, políticos que anda de bicicleta e ganham muito pouco, e sobretudo uma população altamente educada. Não creio que sirva de modelo para o Brasil.
O "socialismo" da matéria é puramente alegórico, ou simbólico, e não tem nada do sabor marxista, ou leninista, que muitos companheiros favoreceriam. A burguesia concorda em deixar metade da renda com o Estado, mas continua burguesia...
We venture to the very heart of the hell that is
Scandinavian socialism—and find out that it’s not so bad. Pricey, yes,
but a good place to start and run a company.
Wiggo Dalmo is a classic entrepreneurial type: the Working-Class Kid Made Good.
Dalmo, who is 39, with sandy blond hair and an easy smile, grew up in
modest circumstances in a blue-collar town dominated by the steel
industry. After graduating from high school, he apprenticed as an
industrial mechanic and got a job repairing mining equipment.
He liked the challenge of the work but not the drudgery of working
for someone else. "I never felt like there was a place for me as an
employee," Dalmo explains as we drive past spent chemical drums and
enormous mounds of scrap metal on the road that leads to his office.
When he needed an inexpensive part to complete a repair, company rules
required Dalmo to fill out a purchase order and wait days for approval,
when he knew he could simply walk into a hardware store and buy one. He
resented this on a practical level—and as an insult to his intelligence.
"I wanted more responsibility at my job, more control," he says. "I
wanted freedom."
In 1998, Dalmo quit his job, bought a used pickup truck, and started
calling on clients as an independent contractor. By year's end, he had
six employees, all mechanics, and he was making more money than he ever
had. Within three years, his new company, Momek, was booking more than
$1 million a year in revenue and quickly expanding into new lines of
business. He built a machine shop and began manufacturing parts for oil
rigs, and he started bidding on and winning contracts to staff oil
drilling sites and mines throughout the country. He kept hiring, kept
bidding, and when he looked around a decade later, he had a $44 million
company with 150 employees.
As his company grew, Dalmo adopted the familiar habits of successful
entrepreneurs. He bought a Porsche, a motorcycle, and a wardrobe of polo
shirts with his corporate logo on the chest. As rock music blasts from
the speakers in his office, Dalmo tells me that he is proud of the
company he has created. "We tried to build a family, and we have
succeeded," he says. "I have no friends outside this company."
This is exactly the kind of pride I often hear from the CEOs I have met while working at
Inc.,
but for one important difference: Whereas most entrepreneurs in Dalmo's
position develop a retching distaste for paying taxes, Dalmo doesn't
mind them much. "The tax system is good—it's fair," he tells me. "What
we're doing when we are paying taxes is buying a product. So the
question isn't how you pay for the product; it's the quality of the
product." Dalmo
likes the government's services, and he believes that he is paying a fair price.
This is particularly surprising, because the prices Dalmo pays for
government services are among the highest in the world. He lives and
works in the small city of Mo i Rana, which is about 17 miles south of
the Arctic Circle in Norway. As a Norwegian, he pays nearly 50 percent
of his income to the federal government, along with a substantial
additional tax that works out to roughly 1 percent of his total net
worth. And that's just what he pays directly. Payroll taxes in Norway
are double those in the U.S. Sales taxes, at 25 percent, are roughly
triple.
Last year, Dalmo paid $102,970 in personal taxes on his income and
wealth. I know this because tax returns, like most everything else in
Norway, are a matter of public record. Anyone anywhere can log on to a
website maintained by the government and find out what kind of scratch a
fellow Norwegian taxpayer makes—be he Ole Einar Bjørndalen, the famous
Norwegian biathlete, or Ole the next-door neighbor. This, Dalmo
explains, has a chilling effect on any desire he might have to live even
larger. "When you start buying expensive stuff, people start to talk,"
says Dalmo. "I have to be careful, because some of the people who are
judging are my potential customers."
Welcome to Norway, where business is radically transparent,
militantly egalitarian, and, of course, heavily taxed. This is
socialism, the sort of thing your average American CEO has nightmares
about. But not Dalmo—and not most Norwegians. "The capitalist system
functions well," Dalmo says. "But I'm a socialist in my bones."
Norway, population five million, is a very small, very rich
country. It is a cold country and, for half the year, a dark country.
(The sun sets in late November in Mo i Rana. It doesn't rise again until
the end of January.) This is a place where entire cities smell of
drying fish—an odor not unlike the smell of rotting fish—and where, in
the most remote parts, one must be careful to avoid polar bears. The
food isn't great.
Bear strikes, darkness, and whale meat notwithstanding, Norway is
also an exceedingly pleasant place to make a home. It ranked third in
Gallup's latest global happiness survey. The unemployment rate, just 3.5
percent, is the lowest in Europe and one of the lowest in the world.
Thanks to a generous social welfare system, poverty is almost
nonexistent.
Norway is also full of entrepreneurs like Wiggo Dalmo. Rates of
start-up creation here are among the highest in the developed world, and
Norway has more entrepreneurs per capita than the United States,
according to the latest report by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a
Boston-based research consortium. A 2010 study released by the U.S.
Small Business Administration reported a similar result: Although
America remains near the top of the world in terms of entrepreneurial
aspirations -- that is, the percentage of people who want to start new
things—in terms of actual start-up activity, our country has fallen
behind not just Norway but also Canada, Denmark, and Switzerland.
If you care about the long-term health of the American economy, this
should seem strange—maybe even troubling. After all, we have been told
for decades that higher taxes are without-a-doubt, no-question-about-it
Bad for Business. President Obama recently bragged that his
administration had passed "16 different tax cuts for America's small
businesses over the last couple years. These are tax cuts that can help
America—help businesses...making new investments right now."
Since the Reagan Revolution, which drastically cut tax rates for
wealthy individuals and corporations, we have gotten used to hearing
these sorts of announcements from our leaders. Few have dared to argue
against tax cuts for businesses and business owners. Questioning whether
entrepreneurs really need tax cuts has been like asking if soldiers
really need weapons or whether teachers really need textbooks—a possible
position, sure, but one that would likely get you laughed out of the
room if you suggested it. Or thrown out of elected office.
Taxes in the U.S. have fallen dramatically over the past 30 years. In
1978, the top federal tax rates were as follows: 70 percent for
individuals, 48 percent for corporations, and almost 40 percent on
capital gains. Americans as a whole paid the ninth-lowest taxes among
countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a
group of 34 of the largest democratic, market economies. Today, the top
marginal tax rates are 35 percent, 35 percent, and 15 percent,
respectively. (Even these rates overstate the level of taxation in
America. Few large corporations pay anywhere near the 35 percent
corporate tax; Warren Buffett has famously said that he pays 18 percent
in income tax.) Only two countries in the OECD—Chile and Mexico—pay a
lower percentage of their gross domestic product in taxes than we
Americans do.
But there is precious little evidence to suggest that our low taxes
have done much for entrepreneurs—or even for the economy as a whole.
"It's actually quite hard to say how tax policy affects the economy,"
says Joel Slemrod, a University of Michigan professor who served on the
Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan. Slemrod says there is
no statistical evidence to prove that low taxes result in economic
prosperity. Some of the most prosperous countries—for instance, Denmark,
Sweden, Belgium, and, yes, Norway—also have some of the highest taxes.
Norway, which in 2009 had the world's highest per-capita income, avoided
the brunt of the financial crisis: From 2006 to 2009, its economy grew
nearly 3 percent. The American economy grew less than one-tenth of a
percent during the same period. Meanwhile, countries with some of the
lowest taxes in Europe, like Ireland, Iceland, and Estonia, have
suffered profoundly. The first two nearly went bankrupt; Estonia, the
darling of antitax groups like the Cato Institute, currently has an
unemployment rate of 16 percent. Its economy shrank 14 percent in 2009.
Moreover, the typical arguments peddled by business groups and in the editorial pages of
The Wall Street Journal—
the idea, for instance, that George W. Bush's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003
created economic growth—are problematic. The unemployment rate rose
following the passage of both tax-cut packages, and economic growth
during Bush's eight years in office badly lagged growth during the
Clinton presidency, before the tax cuts were passed.
And so the case of Norway—one of the most entrepreneurial, most
heavily taxed countries in the world—should give us pause. What if we
have been wrong about taxes? What if tax cuts are nothing like weapons
or textbooks? What if they don't matter as much as we think they do?
I'm sure I've already pissed off some people with that question—and
not just the rich ones. It's hard these days to say anything positive
about taxes without being accused of economic treason. President Barack
Obama's health care plan and his proposal to allow certain Bush tax cuts
to expire in 2012—a move that would cause the top marginal tax rate on
individuals to go up by 4.6 basis points, to the rate that prevailed in
the late 1990s—have caused the administration to be eviscerated by
business groups and their allies. "We are essentially undoing the very
thing that has made America exceptional: the free enterprise system,"
wrote congressional candidate (and now a Republican congressman from New
York) Richard Hanna in a letter published by the National Federation of
Independent Business. "We can no longer devalue the energy of the
entrepreneur this way." Newt Gingrich, a presidential hopeful and the
former Speaker of the House, has called Obama's presidency the first
step toward "European socialism and secularism," which he has suggested
is a greater threat to our country than Islamic terrorism.
The idea that Americans should be more terrified of Norwegian
economists than of al Qaeda bombmakers is pretty nutty, but I couldn't
help wondering: How bad would European socialism really be? What if
President Obama's health care and tax policies—which so far have been
modest by European standards—are just the beginning? What if his
proposal to allow the income tax rate on the richest Americans to rise
by several basis points is just the first step? What if, say, by some
crazy backdoor dealing involving Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and the Ghost
of Ted Kennedy, liberals manage something more sweeping: taxes of 50
percent, a government-run health care system, an expansion of Social
Security, and sweeping regulations on business?
In other words, instead of some American version of European
socialism, what if we got the genuine article? What if the nightmare
scenario were real? What if you woke up tomorrow as a CEO in a socialist
country?
To answer this question, I spent two weeks in Norway, seeking
out entrepreneurs in all sorts of industries and circumstances.I met
fish farmers in the country's northern hinterlands and cosmopolitan
techies in Oslo, the capital. I met start-up founders who were years
away from having to worry about making money and then paying taxes on
it, and I met established entrepreneurs who every year fork over
millions of dollars to the authorities. (Norway's currency is the
kroner. I have converted all figures in this article to dollars.)
The first thing I learned is that Norwegians don't think about taxes
the way we do. Whereas most Americans see taxes as a burden, Norwegian
entrepreneurs tend to see them as a purchase, an exchange of cash for
services. "I look at it as a lifelong investment," says Davor Sutija,
CEO of Thinfilm, a Norwegian start-up that is developing a low-cost
version of the electronic tags retailers use to track merchandise.
Sutija has a unique perspective on this matter: He is an American who
grew up in Miami and, 20 years ago, married a Norwegian woman and moved
to Oslo. In 2009, as an employee of Thinfilm's former parent company,
he earned about $500,000, half of which he took home and half of which
went to the Kingdom of Norway. (The country's tax system is progressive,
and the highest tax rates kick in at $124,000. From there, the income
tax rate, including a national insurance tax, is 47.8 percent.) If he
had stayed in the U.S., he would have paid at least $50,000 less in
taxes, but he has no regrets. (For a detailed comparison, see "
How High Is Up?")
"There are no private schools in Norway," he says. "All schooling is
public and free. By being in Norway and paying these taxes, I'm making
an investment in my family."
For a modestly wealthy entrepreneur like Sutija, the value of living
in this socialist country outweighs the cost. Every Norwegian worker
gets free health insurance in a system that produces longer life
expectancy and lower infant mortality rates than our own. At age 67,
workers get a government pension of up to 66 percent of their working
income, and everyone gets free education, from nursery school through
graduate school. (Amazingly, this includes colleges outside the country.
Want to send your kid to Harvard? The Norwegian government will pick up
most of the tab.) Disability insurance and parental leave are also
extremely generous. A new mother can take 46 weeks of maternity leave at
full pay—the government, not the company, picks up the tab—or 56 weeks
off at 80 percent of her normal wage. A father gets 10 weeks off at full
pay.
These are benefits afforded to every Norwegian, regardless of income
level. But it should be said that most Norwegians make about the same
amount of money. In Norway, the typical starting salary for a worker
with no college education is a very generous $45,000, while the starting
salary for a Ph.D. is about $70,000 a year. (This makes certain kinds
of industries, such as textile manufacturing, impossible; on the other
hand, technology businesses are very cheap to run.) Between workers who
do the same job at a given company, salaries vary little, if at all. At
Wiggo Dalmo's company, everyone doing the same job makes the same
salary.
The result is that successful companies find other ways to motivate
and retain their employees. Dalmo's staff may consist mostly of
mechanics and machinists, but he treats them like Google engineers.
Momek employs a chef who prepares lunch for the staff every day. The
company throws a blowout annual party—the tab last year was more than
$100,000. Dalmo supplements the standard government health plan with a
$330-per-employee-per-year private insurance plan that buys employees
treatment in private hospitals if a doctor isn't immediately available
in a public one. These benefits have kept turnover rates at Momek below 2
percent, compared with 7 percent in the industry.
But it takes more than perks to keep a worker motivated in Norway. In
a country with low unemployment and generous unemployment benefits, a
worker's threat to quit is more credible than it is in the United
States, giving workers more leverage over employers. And though Norway
makes it easy to lay off workers in cases of economic hardship, firing
an employee for cause typically takes months, and employers generally
end up paying at least three months' severance. "You have to be a much
more democratic manager," says Bjørn Holte, founder and CEO of bMenu, an
Oslo-based start-up that makes mobile versions of websites. Holte pays
himself $125,000 a year. His lowest-paid employee makes more than
$60,000. "You can't just treat them like machines," he says. "If you do,
they'll be gone."
If the Norwegian system forces CEOs to be more conciliatory to their
employees, it also changes the calculus of entrepreneurship for
employees who hope to start their own companies. "The problem for
entrepreneurship in Norway is it's so lucrative to be an employee," says
Lars Kolvereid, the lead researcher for the Global Entrepreneurship
Monitor in Norway. Whereas in the U.S., about one-quarter of start-ups
are founded by so-called necessity entrepreneurs—that is, people who
start companies because they feel they have no good alternative—in
Norway, the number is only 9 percent, the third lowest in the world
after Switzerland and Denmark, according to the Global Entrepreneurship
Monitor.
This may help explain why entrepreneurship in Norway has thrived,
even as it stagnates in the U.S. "The three things we as Americans worry
about—education, retirement, and medical expenses—are things that
Norwegians don't worry about," says Zoltan J. Acs, a professor at George
Mason University and the chief economist for the Small Business
Administration's Office of Advocacy. Acs thinks the recession in the
U.S. has intensified this disparity and is part of the reason America
has slipped in the past few years. When the U.S. economy is booming, the
absence of guaranteed health care isn't a big concern for aspiring
founders, but with unemployment near double digits, would-be
entrepreneurs are more cautious. "When the middle class is shrinking,
the pool of entrepreneurs is shrinking," says Acs.
The downside to Norway's security, of course, is that it is
expensive. Norway has substantial oil reserves—but most of the proceeds
are invested abroad in a sovereign wealth fund. Norway's generous social
benefits are financed largely from taxes that fall heavily on the
country's richest people. The most controversial of these taxes is a
wealth tax, a 1.1 percent annual levy on the entirety of a person's
holdings above about $117,000, including stock in private companies held
by the owner.
In search of an opinion on how such soak-the-successful policies
affect the truly successful, I visited the tiny town of Misvær, a
mountain hamlet in the country's interior, 38 miles north of the Arctic
Circle. To get to Misvær, I took a small plane from Oslo to Bodø, where I
was met by a gorgeous twentysomething blonde in a flight suit. She was,
I somehow knew instantly, the pilot for Inger Ellen Nicolaisen, the
country's answer to Donald Trump and the most flamboyant character in a
country that prefers its wealthy to go about their business modestly.
After a short helicopter ride over a fjord and some mountains, we
touch down in a snow-covered backyard, where we are greeted by a
positively feudal scene: Nicolaisen trots out from the house, a
modernistic structure perched far above the rest of the town like some
enormous suburban castle, followed by five dogs—two Great Danes, two toy
poodles, and a bulldog. She has shoulder-length platinum blond hair and
wears teal contact lenses and knee-high boots, looking entirely unlike
the 52-year-old mother of three that she is. "Welcome to Miami," she
yells above the roar of the helicopter.
She leads me inside, where we are attended by a pair of servants who
bring us coffee, pastries, and, though it's not quite noon, champagne.
Nicolaisen's husband—her second, a 39-year-old former professional
soccer player— eventually shows up and immediately begins assisting the
servants. Later, he shows me around the grounds on a six-wheel
all-terrain vehicle. There are the grazing sheep, the three teepees
equipped with heat, electricity, and full bars—Nicolaisen uses the
structures for corporate retreats—and the pack of Icelandic horses. As
we rumble around on the ATV, it seems clear to me that these are the
sort of people who should be animated by the wealth tax—and who won't
mind saying so.
But they aren't, not really. Although Nicolaisen considers herself a
conservative, she told me the issue that most animates her is poverty,
not taxes. "Yeah, the wealth tax is a problem," she says. "But you have
to make a choice. You can live in the Cayman Islands and pay no tax. But
I don't want to live in the Cayman Islands. To live in Norway, you have
to do what you have to. I think it's worth it."
Nicolaisen is famous for being the host of the country's version of
The Apprentice
and for founding Nikita, the largest chain of hair salons in
Scandinavia. Over 26 years, Nikita has expanded into a hair care
conglomerate called Raise, whose concerns include a line of
private-label products and 120 salons in Norway and Sweden. Nicolaisen
owns the $60 million company outright. Her story, which she tells in a
best-selling memoir,
Drivkraft—Norwegian for
driving force—is
a triumph of scrappiness. Nicolaisen dropped out of high school at 14,
when she became pregnant. In her late teens, she supported herself and
her daughter, Linda, by hawking handmade children's clothes. In her
early 20s, she moved to Bodø and got a job as the receptionist in a hair
salon. She took up with the salon's owner, they eventually married, and
she got hooked on the hair business.
Nicolaisen was never much of a stylist, but her entrepreneurial
ambitions quickly outstripped her husband's."My first goal was five
salons—that seemed like a big goal," says Nicolaisen. She would
eventually divorce her husband and take over the business completely. By
2000, she had expanded to 50 salons, and she found herself at a
crossroads. She was booking $21 million in revenue a year, and the
company was throwing off enough cash to allow her to live well. "I had
to decide: Should I relax, stop growing, and just earn a lot of money,
or should I expand?" she says. "I realized I couldn't stop there, so I
set the next goal at 500. Because, you know—5, 50, 500—it made sense."
I would have thought that Norway's tax system would discourage this
kind of thinking, but it doesn't seem to have been a factor. When I
asked her why she bothered growing, she said simply, "I'm an
entrepreneur. It's in my backbone."
This was the attitude of even those entrepreneurs who strenuously
objected to the Norwegian tax regimen, which I learned when I traveled
to Stokmarknes and visited the region's best-known entrepreneur, Inge
Berg. Berg's company, a fish-farming enterprise called Nordlaks, is a
half-hour's flight north of Bodø. The cold North Atlantic waters there
make for ideal spawning grounds for salmon, cod, and herring.
We hop into an inflatable skiff and, with Berg in the cockpit, motor
across the fjord to one of the company's 23 fish farms. There are three
floating pens, barely visible from a distance, each housing 50,000
teenage salmon jostling to catch the food pellets that are being blown
over the pens from a nearby barge. When Berg started as a fish farmer,
it was his job to hand-feed the fish, dumping bucket after bucket of
feed over the pens.
From the farm, we take the boat back to Berg's slaughterhouse and
packing facility, where the same salmon will eventually meet their
demise at a breathtaking rate of one fish per second. "One of the
reasons we've been successful is that we've focused exclusively on
salmon and trout farming—some other companies tried to expand to the
tourist industry or the cod industry," Berg says over the din of the
machines. "We invest everything in improving the process." Berg proudly
catalogs a number of innovations—a flash-freezing process, a robotic
packing system, and a fish oil plant that ensures that no fish scrap is
wasted. For now, the oil is mainly used in livestock feed, but Berg
brags that he has made sure it is approved for human consumption, then
proves his point by pouring me a shot of the viscous pink liquid. (It
smelled and tasted awful, but to his point, I did not die.)
In 2009, Nordlaks pulled in $62 million in profits on revenue of $207
million, making Berg, the sole owner, a very rich man. Although the
Norwegian wealth tax includes generous deductions that allow Berg to
report a net worth of about $30 million, far less than he would net if
he sold his company, his tax bill is still substantial. Even if Nordlaks
made no profits, paid no dividends, and paid its owner no salary, Berg
would owe the Norwegian government a third of a million dollars a year.
"Every year, I have to take a dividend, just to pay the tax," he says,
sounding genuinely angry.
Berg is successful enough that paying the wealth tax is no
hardship—in 2009, he took a dividend of nearly $10 million—but when a
company slips into the red, entrepreneurs can find themselves in
trouble. "If a company grows to a large size and then has two bad years
in a row, the founder may be forced to sell some stock," says Erlend
Bullvåg, a business-school professor at the University of Nordland and
an adviser to the Norwegian central bank. But none of the entrepreneurs I
spoke with had been forced to sell stock to pay their taxes—and
Bullvåg, who has interviewed dozens of entrepreneurs on behalf of the
Norwegian central bank, hasn't encountered a case personally. Berg told
me that he hadn't given much thought to the wealth tax; he didn't even
know exactly how it was calculated. "I get so pissed sometimes," he
says. "But you just have to look forward, and it passes."
The posting of tax returns online makes tax evasion nearly
impossible in Norway, but it doesn't stop the very rich from fleeing the
country altogether. The best-known example is John Fredriksen, a
shipping tycoon worth $7.7 billion and at one time the richest
Norwegian. In 2006, Fredriksen, who had kept most of his personal assets
outside the country to avoid taxes, renounced his Norwegian
citizenship. He became the richest man in Cyprus.
Fredriksen's past is murky—he is reputed to have been one of the only
exporters willing to do business with Iran after the revolution—and he
rarely gives interviews. But in 2008, he told The Wall Street Journal,
"It's almost impossible to do business in Norway today." Norway's prime
minister, Jens Stoltenberg, dismissed the defection as no great
loss—Fredriksen hadn't paid personal taxes in Norway for decades, and
his companies continue to pay taxes in the country. Even so, Fredriksen
is something of a folk hero to the entrepreneurs in his former home.
"He is cool," says Jan Egil Flo, chief financial officer of Moods of
Norway, a $35 million clothing company in Stryn. I visited Moods of
Norway's offices on my last day in Norway and chatted with Flo and his
co-founders, Simen Staalnacke and Peder Børresen. The three were able to
start their company, which makes fashionable sportswear and suits,
largely thanks to the beneficence of the Norwegian socialist system. In
2004, they received a $20,000 start-up grant from the Norwegian
equivalent of the Small Business Administration. Staalnacke and Børresen
enrolled in a local college, because doing so meant the government
would cover most of their living expenses. This may be why, when I ask
the three founders if they might become Cypriots anytime soon, they
protest. "No, no, no," says Børresen. "We've received a lot from Norway
and Norwegian society. Giving back is not a problem."
Moods of Norway operates 10 boutiques, which, in a country of five
million, means the company has saturated its home market. Two years ago,
it opened its first store in the U.S., a 2,500-square-foot space in
Beverly Hills, and Flo is in negotiations to open stores in New York
City's SoHo neighborhood and Mall of America in Minnesota. It has been
more challenging than he expected. "It's much easier to do business in
Norway," Flo says. "The U.S. isn't one country; it's 50 countries."
Although Norway may be more heavily regulated than America, the
regulations are uniform across the country and are less apt to change
drastically when the political winds blow.
In addition to regulatory stability, Flo pointed to a number of other
advantages his company enjoys in Norway. Although personal taxes on
entrepreneurs are high, the tax rate on corporate profits is low—28
percent, compared with an average of about 40 percent in combined
federal and state taxes in the U.S. A less generous depreciation
schedule and higher payroll taxes in Norway more than make up for that
difference—Norwegian companies pay 14.1 percent of the entirety of an
employee's salary, compared with 7.65 percent of the first $106,800 in
the U.S.—but that money pays for benefits such as health care and
retirement plans. "There's no big difference in cost," Flo says. In
fact, his company makes more money, after taxes, on items sold in Norway
than it does on those sold in its California shop.
Flo is pushing his business into America for reasons that have
nothing to do with our tax structure. He wants Moods of Norway to be
here because America is the largest, most influential market in the
world. "There are more Norwegians in the Minneapolis area than in
Norway," Flo says excitedly. "If you can get known in America, then the
whole world knows you."
I heard this sort of sentiment from lots of the entrepreneurs I spoke
with in Norway. They talked about the ambition and aggressiveness of
American culture, which can't help breeding success. The younger
entrepreneurs yearned for our tradition of mentoring, whereby seasoned
entrepreneurs help nascent ones, with money or advice or both.
The more time I spent with Norwegian entrepreneurs, the more I became
convinced that the things that make the United States a great country
for entrepreneurs have little to do with the fact that we enjoy
relatively low taxes. Kenneth Winther, the founder of the Oslo
management consultancy MoonWalk, regaled me for hours about the virtues
of Norway—security, good roads, good schools. But at the end of our
interview, he confessed that he had been hedging his bets: He intended
to apply to the American green-card lottery in January. "Why not try?"
he said with a shrug.
I also became convinced of this truth, which I have observed in the
smartest American and the smartest Norwegian entrepreneurs: It's not
about the money. Entrepreneurs are not hedge fund managers, and they
rarely operate like coldly rational economic entities. This theme runs
through books like Bo Burlingham's
Small Giants, about company
owners who choose not to maximize profits and instead seek to make their
companies great; and it can be found in the countless stories, many of
them told in this magazine, of founders who leave money on the table in
favor of things they judge to be more important.
At one point, I asked Wiggo Dalmo why he was still working so hard to
expand his company: Why not just have a nice life—especially given that
the authorities would take a hefty chunk of whatever additional money
he made? "For me personally, building something to change the world is
the kick," he says. "The worst thing to me is people who chose the
easiest path. We should use our wonderful years to do something on this
earth."
When I got back to the United States, I had a beer with Bjørn
Holte, the CEO of bMenu, whom I'd first met in Oslo. It was early
November—days after the congressional elections—and Holte had just
arrived in New York City, where he is opening a new office. We talked
about the commercial real estate market, the amazing cultural diversity
in a city that has twice as many people as his entire country, and the
current debate in the United States about the role of government. Holte
was fascinated by this last topic, particularly the angry opposition to
President Obama's health care reform package. "It makes me laugh," he
says. "Americans don't understand that you can't have a functioning
economy if people aren't healthy."
Holte's American subsidiary pays annual health care premiums that
make his head spin—more than $23,000 per employee for a family plan—and
that make the cost of employing a software developer in the United
States substantially higher than it is in Norway, even after taxes. (For
a full breakdown, see "
Making Payroll.")
Holte is no pinko—he finds many aspects of Norwegian socialism
problematic, particularly regulations about hiring and firing—but when
he looks at the costs and benefits of taxes in each country, he sees no
contest. Norway is worth the cost.
Of course, that's only half the question when it comes to taxes. The
other, more divisive question is, What is fair? Is it right to make rich
people pay more than poor people? Would paying a greater percentage of
our income for more government services make us less free? "I'd rather
be in the U.S., where you can enjoy the fruit of your labor, rather than
a country like Norway, where your hard work is confiscated by the
government," says Curtis Dubay, senior tax policy analyst at the
Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank that advocates for
lower taxes.
These are important moral issues, but, in America, they are often the
only ones we are willing to consider. We have, as Holte suggests,
become religious about economic policy. We are unable or unwilling to
make the kind of cool-headed calculations about costs and benefits that I
saw in Norway. "There's a disconnect in the way people think about
paying taxes and funding public services that's worse here than in any
other country," says Donald Bruce, a tax economist at the University of
Tennessee. "We refuse to believe that taxes can be used for anything
productive. But then we say, 'Stay out of my Social Security. And my
Medicare. And don't cut defense or national parks.' "
Our collective inability to have a rational conversation about taxes
will have consequences. In 2010, the American budget deficit hit $1.3
trillion, or 10 percent of GDP. By 2035, the deficit could be close to
16 percent of GDP, according to the report issued late last year by the
National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. That report
prescribed dramatic spending cuts and tax increases. But just weeks
after it was released, President Obama and congressional Republicans
unveiled a new package of tax cuts, which will add an extra $800 billion
to the deficit over two years.
Obama has said he hopes to allow these cuts to expire in 2012 and for
income tax rates to revert to levels of the 1990s, and that is only one
of many revenue-generation ideas kicking around in policy circles.
There are also proposals for a tax on millionaires, a national sales
tax, and even a dreaded, Norwegian-style wealth tax.
When lawmakers inevitably take up these issues, it's a sure thing
that those who oppose raising revenue through tax hikes will make the
argument that higher taxes will hurt entrepreneurs. They will make it
sound as if even a modest tax increase would represent a death knell for
American business. But the case of Norway suggests that Americans
should view these arguments with skepticism—and that American
entrepreneurs could stand to be less dogmatic about the role of
government in society.
This isn't to say that entrepreneurs don't have a right to get angry
about taxes—or to fight tax increases in the same way they might fight
any price increase by a supplier. It is to say only that, despite what
you hear from Washington politicians and activist groups, the tax rate
is probably far from the most important issue facing your business.
Entrepreneurs can thrive under almost any regime, even the scourge of
European socialism. "Taxes matter, but their effect is small in
magnitude," says Bruce. "In the end, decisions entrepreneurs make are
about more important things: Is there a market for what you're making?
Are you doing something relevant for the economy? If the answer is no,
then taxes don't matter much."
Max Chafkin is Inc.
's senior writer.
Senior contributing writer
Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter,
Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
@chafkin
