Welfare State Problems in Sweden

Now Even Swedes Are Questioning the Welfare State

https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/2018/06/26/now-even-swedes-are-questioning-the-welfare-state

Paying some of the world’s highest income-tax rates has been the cornerstone of Scandinavia’s social contract, with the political consensus in Sweden to save money for when the economy is less healthy. Yet the country is showing strains all too familiar in other parts of Europe with nationalists gaining support and Swedes increasingly questioning the sustainability of their fabled cradle-to-grave welfare system.

 Resentment has built over the influx of more than 600,000 immigrants over the past five years, many from war-ravaged countries like Afghanistan and Syria, a huge number for a country of 10 million people. 

 

There are also soaring crime rates, gang violence, complaints about education and pregnant mothers even being turned away from maternity wards due to a lack of capacity. The number of people waiting longer than 90 days for an operation or specialist treatment has tripled over the past four years.

 

“The Swedish social contract needs to be reformed,” a dozen entrepreneurs including Nordea Bank AB Chairman Bjorn Wahlroos and Kreab Founder Peje Emilsson wrote in an op-ed in the Dagens Industri newspaper on May 31. “Despite high taxes, politics isn’t delivering its part of the contract in important areas. We get poor value for money.”

 

There are warning signs across Europe of what can happen if disillusionment goes unaddressed. In Britain, popular anger over rising immigration and creaking public services fueled the vote to leave the European Union. Nationalist parties, on the march across continent, just swept to power in Italy.

Maxine Give Dems A Bad Name

 

MAXINE WATERS PRAISED VIOLENT LA RACE RIOTS AS ‘DEFINING MOMENT’ FOR RESISTANCE

http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/25/maxine-waters-race-riots/

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters made news this weekend for endorsing the harassment and intimidation of President Trump’s cabinet members in an angry rant.

 

This isn’t the first time Waters has spoken positively of political violence. In March, she told HuffPost that the horribly violent Los Angeles riots in 1992 were a “defining moment in the way that black people resisted.”

 

She also said, “These were people who had been basically forgotten”:

 

“And because of Rodney King’s beating and the current emotion that was stirring in that, it was like people were saying, ‘We’re here. You can’t do this to us. Look what you’re doing, look how you’ve been. Not only have you been with this consistent police abuse but the same people don’t have access to opportunities and jobs and health care and on and on.”

 

The riots also featured shocking violence on residents of the city. Random innocent peoplewere beaten and killed; many more businesses were destroyed.

 

At a rally Saturday, Waters said, “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!

 

 

Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up?

James Hansen issued dire warnings in the summer of 1988. Today earth is only modestly warmer.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thirty-years-on-how-well-do-global-warming-predictions-stand-up-1529623442

 

James E. Hansen wiped sweat from his brow. Outside it was a record-high 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, as the NASA scientist testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources during a prolonged heat wave, which he decided to cast as a climate event of cosmic significance. He expressed to the senators his “high degree of confidence” in “a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.”

With that testimony and an accompanying paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Mr. Hansen lit the bonfire of the greenhouse vanities, igniting a world-wide debate that continues today about the energy structure of the entire planet. President Obama’s environmental policies were predicated on similar models of rapid, high-cost warming. But the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s predictions affords an opportunity to see how well his forecasts have done—and to reconsider environmental policy accordingly.

Mr. Hansen’s testimony described three possible scenarios for the future of carbon dioxide emissions. He called Scenario A “business as usual,” as it maintained the accelerating emissions growth typical of the 1970s and ’80s. This scenario predicted the earth would warm 1 degree Celsius by 2018. Scenario B set emissions lower, rising at the same rate today as in 1988. Mr. Hansen called this outcome the “most plausible,” and predicted it would lead to about 0.7 degree of warming by this year. He added a final projection, Scenario C, which he deemed highly unlikely: constant emissions beginning in 2000. In that forecast, temperatures would rise a few tenths of a degree before flatlining after 2000.

Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios—enough to determine which was closest to reality. And the winner is Scenario C. Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago