Norway Swings To The Left

[mirror]

Norway’s opposition to form new government

Norway’s prime minister, who presided over four years of unprecedented prosperity fuelled by high oil prices, said Tuesday he will resign after a left-wing opposition bloc won parliamentary elections.

Kjell Magne Bondevik, a Christian Democrat, said his government would step down Oct. 14 if Jens Stoltenberg’s Red-Green alliance had formed a government by then. The three-party alliance won 87 seats in the 169-member national assembly, according to official results from Monday’s election.

Stoltenberg, the Labour leader, campaigned on a pledge to spend more of the country’s vast oil wealth on welfare programs, while Bondevik advocated further tax cuts.

This is a very interesting situation. Great prosperity yet tax cuts rejected in favour of "the common good".

[mirror]

Norway swings to the left

The left, which presented a united front in the election campaign for the first time, promised voters that it would focus on the country’s welfare state, which by international standards is very generous but which Norwegians perceive as being in decline.

“We are going to use Norway’s abundant resources to help the community, to find work for all, to have quality schools, and security and health care,” Stoltenberg said yesterday.

Bondevik’s coalition had touted Norway’s robust economic health during its four years in power, and argued that Stoltenberg’s promises of more spending would destroy jobs and drive interest rates higher in the Scandinavian country, which is the world’s third largest oil exporter.

The make-up of the next government is expected in the days following the presentation of the 2006 budget on October 14.

This will be Stoltenberg’s second go at the helm.

In 2000, he organised a parliamentary revolt which caused then-prime minister Bondevik to fall and gave Stoltenberg a one-and-a-half-year stint as premier. But in 2001 he led Labour to its worst election defeat in a hundred years after presenting himself as a party “moderniser”.

Since then, Stoltenberg, 46, has sought to build bridges to the traditional party base, and this time positioned himself more clearly to the left, notably by denouncing tax cuts for the wealthy.

It is amazing what you can achieve when you work together. Canada should heed Norway's political savvy and go the same route.

[losiguy]

Sounds like a great plan. Take money from successful people and give it to the poor.

[Montgomery Burns]

Norway might've swung to the left but I believe more countries are moving right.

Germany (although still about 50-50), Poland, Estonia, Australia, USA, Britain (foreign policy-wise and Blair has the sense to keep Thatcher's economic reforms).

[Montgomery Burns]

Sounds like a great plan.  Take money from successful people and give it to the poor.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Check this out from The National Post:

Ontario, like every other government in the country—Alberta’s included—is hopelessly convinced that the only obstacle to nirvana is a lack of public spending on social programs. If only there were more tax dollars to spend, every hip patient would get replacement surgery tomorrow, every public school student would graduate with honours and every poor family would be livin’ large.

This faith in the link between social progress and public expenditures explains recent hints by Ottawa, Ontario and some other provinces that Alberta might have to be made to “share” a greater portion of its oil wealth.

If the feds and provinces could be disabused of their belief that just a little more spending will produce heaven on earth, they wouldn’t covet the new pot of gold that sits at the end of a rainbow in Calgary.

This devotion to expensive, public solutions to everything borders on the millenarian.

By a conservative estimate, we have spent nearly $4-trillion dollars on social programs in this country over the past 40 years. If the problems that spending was meant to solve still exist—and indeed, some have gotten no better or even worsened—the conclusion of a rational person might be that big, expensive social programs aren’t the answer.

They’ve been tried and failed. Move on.

But too many Canadians and their politicians have become True Believers in the welfare state cult. If the $4-trillion we’ve already spent hasn’t produced the expected results, that just means we need to keep spending. Lay out even more and the Promised Land will materialize there, just over the horizon of the next budget or the next first ministers’ conference or intergovernmental transfer agreement.