A growing segment of aging people will bring more medical/care expenses, covered by relatively fewer working people. The fairer a social security system is, the more the expenses will change once the population pyramid shifts.
Wasteful spending on infrastructure is but one concrete example; we also see gross inefficiencies manifest in costs of American healthcare, education, defense, etc. While there are many complex factors contributing to such waste, a major underlying reason is that there’s simply so much money to go around that nobody bothered to optimize for costs, to the point that they’ve ballooned so unsustainably that the US is increasingly incapable of building anything at all.
[0] https://bettercities.substack.com/p/americas-infrastructure-...
[1] https://betweenhellandhighwater.com/2023/06/22/the-paris-met...
[2] https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-Draft-Bus...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/spains...
And it did severely reduce Netherlands' competitiveness back when the Groningen gas field was operational.
Norway is a well off country, but compared to their Scandi peers Denmark and Sweden, they don't have as diversified an economy - especially innovation industries like Pharma in DK or DefenseTech in Sweden - due to their heavy ONG dependency [0].
Denmark is equally blessed with NatGas fields like Netherlands was (look at a map) and similar to Norway, yet they still incubated a domestic innovation industry and additionally retained a diversified manufacturing and agricultural economy.
Furthermore, large soverign wealth funds in democracies can become especially enticing to raid during protracted downturns or the rise of populism - look at Alaska's PIF as an example.
Additionally, plenty of black swans exist in the world now. The US-EU FTA makes US ONG exports signficantly more cost competitive than Norwegian offerings, and potential FTAs with MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay) and Canada can further reduce Norway's staying power in European energy markets. As Norway is not an EU member state, it's in a worse position to defend it's interests in it's largest market.
And that's the crux of the argument - Norway is unable to incubate alternative industries that can help diversify away from their ONG dependency, which increases the long term risks for Norway, and has risks that could lead to opportunistic raiding of their SWF.
The majority of the "rich" have already moved to another country. Business owners have to sell their business to a foreigner to be able to pay the wealth tax. These business owners use this money to move to another country and retire. Businesses has stopped hiring people without work experience. Even if you have a computer science / engineering degree. The brain drain has already started. The rich no longer invest in local initiatives like local sports, local businesses or volunteering as they are "disconnected". A lot less tax is being paid and to cover for this we need to withdraw more from the oil fund. It may take a few decades to empty the fund. But I think that money will be wasted within a decade if "hate" against rich continues. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1857694219244048691
I am seriously worried about the future, and I am considering moving to Sweden. I love building businesses, but I feel that the state is stealing resources I need to build a business that can pay tax for the next generations.
The high sick leave thing is another serious matter. But when politicians deflect responsibility when they've made a mistake, especially when public scrutiny or pressure increases, they send a message to the rest of the Norwegian population that it is fine to take a few months off if work is too hard. This has not happened once, this has happened a few dozen times just the last few years. And founders, they do not have the right for a single day of paid sick leave unless they employ themself and pay extra tax.
It's not that surprising people spend less time eating out and travelling since it's a very cold country.
Education is free. Whether one considers the social support to be UBI is a matter of debate, I guess, but right now it would leave you decidedly poor/low-class.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>>42419831 (Dec 2024)
>>40868959 (July 2024)
>>35407476 (April 2023)
>>34854957 (Feb 2023)
>>30293928 (Feb 2022)
>>28699914 (Sept 2021)
>>28654320 (Sept 2021)
>>28650525 (Sept 2021)
Specifically, the propaganda model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
> First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views corporate media as businesses interested in the sale of a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers) rather than the pursuit of quality journalism in service of the public. Describing the media's "societal purpose", Chomsky writes, "... the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature". The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five classes are: ownership of the medium, the medium's funding sources, sourcing, flak, and anti-communism or "fear ideology".