I keep seeing people say that increased taxes will force jobs overseas. I see this as a possibility, so what kind of measures can be taken to ensure this doesn't happen?
Interestingly enough, after some research, I found the Forbes, "Best Countries For Business" list for 2015.
http://www.forbes.com/best-countries-for-business/list/
#1 Denmark
#3 Norway
#5 Sweden
#22 US
If higher taxes are supposed to chase away jobs, then why are these countries so heavily favored?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
Just for reference. While I'm sure this doesn't tell close to the whole story and some economically minded person will likely come in and clear the air, but it *appears* that the U.S. taxes corporations significantly higher than Denmark/Sweden/Norway/Canada, while taxing its citizens far less than said countries. Again, I'm sure there is far more to this story as the realities of taxes and writeoffs and whatnot can be quite complex.
They keyword here is business regulation.
Taxes are not a very big concern for multi-national corporations. They pretty much de facto decide how much they want to pay. Some companies like Nestle and Shell pay zero in most countries that they operate.
However, business regulation is a big concern. And in scandinavia business regulation is relatively low (in terms of compliance with law). The primary role of government in Scandinavia (when it comes to business regulation), is mostly to act as a mediator between unions and employer organisations to decide on business regulation. This leads to a very flexible environment, where the labour and business standards are customized and negotiated for every separate industry.
Keep in mind that Scandinavia doesn't even operate with minimum wage laws. Yet McDonalds workers get like 20$ an hour. This is because of strong unions.
http://www.lo.dk/English version/About LO/History/TheSeptemberCompromise.aspx
Also concepts like "Flexicurity" plays a big role
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
The above mentioned is a key factor in the high labor standards, but low business regulation, which in most other countries correlate with each other. But this factor is rarely ever mentioned in the discussions about the nordic model for some reason.
no bozo, that's not what I suggested.
My point was that the rest of the developed world (outside of America) gets careless with social entitlements partly due to the US taking care of their defense needs.
This is not true at all. You can look at defense spending before and after NATO. It hasn't changed much.
Small european nations like my own don't really care about defense. We have accepted that if a larger military power wants to destroy us, then there is not really anything we can do about it.
Look at WW2 for example. No matter how much Denmark decides to spend on defense, we would never be able to defend ourselves from a german invasion (or Russian for that matter). If someone invades us, we simply wave the white flag and hope for the best.
In modern times we join defense alliances, and meet the required obligations that allows us to be members. But never has the motivation for implementing universal healthcare, or strong safety nets, been intertwined with discussions about military budgets.
It's also extremely naive to think that american military spending is done for charity reasons, so that those poor europeans can have their universal healthcare. The U.S got self interest as their primary motivations. Like any other country when it comes to defense.
So far you have demonstrated yourself to be economically and politically illiterate. So I guess it's only natural that you start resorting to posting edgy quotes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy