Sweden Turning Rightward

I think it was Mark Steyn who pointed out that upon the election of Barack Obama, America had decided to turn to the Left just as all other major Western nations had decided that it was time to turn to the Right.

Just look at this table of world leaders as evidence:

To that end, Forbes releases an article in next week's edition about how Sweden's government is taking the country to the Right because being a socialist country isn't everything it's cracked up to be. Here are some choice quotes:

As the finance minister of Sweden, Borg is the chief financial officer of a country long known as a walking billboard for a social welfare state. In Borg's view, the 1970s and 1980s were lost decades for Sweden. Left-leaning politicians pushed government spending, excluding investment outlays, from 22% of gross domestic product in 1970 to 30% in 1980. Real growth fell from an average of 4.4% annually in the 1960s to 2.4% in the 1970s and remained low for the next two decades.

Like many societies, we went too far in our welfare-state ambitions," say
Borg (pronounced "Bor-ee").

and

Since sweeping to power in 2006, Reinfeldt's center-right Alliance has been shrinking Sweden's welfare state. The government is resisting calls to rescue its struggling auto industry. To hear Borg tell it, his government isn't inspired by coldhearted Darwinism but by cold, hard evidence that the easier the state makes life for people, the easier they take it.

and

Borg's prescription for growth is simple: cut taxes. His government has slashed the tax rate on low incomes from 30.7% to 17.1%. The combined tax take (national and local; income and other) has fallen by 2.5 percentage points in three years to 46.6% of gross domestic product.

We're told by Democrats to look to the Socialist countries of Europe for inspiration - heck, that's why so many young people voted for Obama. They wanted to be like by the world's Left. Well, what if none of those ideas really work?