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by tnr23 1496 days ago
Norway oil is way more relevant for your thesis than Norway taxes
4 comments

Yea right, so is the German oil for Germany. /s

You seem to be quite the expert on Norway. Can you elaborate how they prop up social services with oil money?

Why do you feel offended?

OP had the thesis that the "Norway sovereign fund" is funded by high taxes. This fund is also known as the "Oil fund": The Government Pension Fund Global, also known as the Oil Fund, was established in 1990 to invest the surplus revenues of the Norwegian petroleum sector.

Conclusion: The Norwegian society is not just rich just because you are that smart. You obviously had a good portion of luck.

I believe the parent comment is referring to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

Lol, don't speak about high taxes if you don't even know how Norway and oil go together...
lol not like the us could do the same.
So does Texas and Alaska, and even California?
Doesn't Alaska provide a small basic income for its citizens funded by oil revenue?
Norway oil [with a visionary who helped guide its investment] is more relevant.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19594153
The US has 6.7x more oil reserves than Norway: https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-reserves-by-country/
So US has around 9x less per capita since only ~5 million people live in Norway?
Since people are misreading this comment, either deliberately or because I have not been clear enough, I am going to assume good faith and edit the comment to be more clear.

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And 6.7x the amount of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global exceeds the entire annual budget of the US government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...

Imagine if the US could just magically borrow from next year's budget, but at zero cost? That's the net effect of having an entire additional several trillion dollars laying around.

In hard numbers, that 6.7x works out to around $9.3 trillion, of which it's a pretty safe assumption that you can "borrow" around 3% of it annually, forever. That works out to around $280 billion.

It ain't chump change. We could easily end homelessness in the US with that amount, and have much more left over to do even more social good.

https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/social-justic...

After we take the 50-ish billion a year it would take to eradicate homelessness (keep in mind, we can sustain this in real terms approximately forever), let's move on to higher education. The Debt Free College act would reportedly cost the US $75 billion a year.

https://educationdata.org/how-much-would-free-college-cost

No problem. We've only spent half of what we can borrow in perpetuity from the future with this hypothetical sovereign wealth fund laying around.

Let's go for the triple crown and give everybody universal, employer-independent health coverage.

Oh, guess what? That was a trick. Implementing universal healthcare, simply replacing premiums by taxes, would save the US many more billions of dollars we could put to good use doing even more social good.

https://www.citizen.org/news/fact-check-medicare-for-all-wou...

Or maybe it would cost an additional $149 billion. Who cares? We're still under budget.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

And, so, now, we've reached a point where nobody in the US needs to ever worry about student loans, medical costs, or homelessness again. (Well, okay, not nobody -- we still need to figure out something for the people who have taken out student loans already, but I think we can probably handle that.) It's not quite the extensive welfare state that Norway has, but it's pretty damn close.

Guess what happens to the labor market under those conditions? If you said "it becomes much more like a free market," you guessed right! And who can argue against that, really?

Comparing a pension fund, which is designed to pay out over, well, indefinitely, to an annual budget, makes no sense. One is a rate. One is a total. It's like saying you can fly 400 mph but the earth is only 90 mega-miles from the sun and since 90 is less than 400 the sun is not that far.

Numerology doesn't work in economics.

The fact is that Norway has this luxury solely through massive per capita oil wealth. The US cannot come close to this.