Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck 61: Why Are Nordic People So.... Happy?

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

For over a decade, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Sweden have consistently ranked among the happiest nations on Earth—but why? We dig into the research behind the World Happiness Report, separate fact from political myth, and explore whether strong social safety nets, low governmental corruption, public trust, and the Nordic model of government really do create happier lives. Along the way, we also examine the decades of propaganda, misconceptions, and ideological battles that have shaped how many Americans think about Scandinavia—and ask what lessons, if any, the United States should take from the world's happiest people. Fuck yeah, bro. For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to another edition of Time Sucks Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins and today I'll be sharing the story of, or I guess rather asking the question of, why are Nordic people so damn happy? What are those hoingy boongue, oof to high cheekbone having Vikings doing that the rest of us aren't? How dare they smile and skip and nap more up in their frozen wastelands and the rest of us?

To quote the 2020 World Happiness Report, what exactly makes Nordic citizens so exceptionally satisfied with their lives? Through reviewing the existing studies, theories, and data behind the World Happiness Report, we find that the most prominent explanations include factors related to the quality of institutions, such as reliable and extensive welfare benefits, low corruption, and well-functioning democracy and state institutions. Furthermore, Nordic citizens experience a high sense of autonomy and freedom, as well as high levels of social trust towards each other, which play an important role in determining life's satisfaction. We also show that a few popular explanations for Nordic happiness, such as the small population and homogeneity of the Nordic countries, and a few counterarguments against Nordic happiness, such as the cold weather and the suicide rates actually don't seem to have much to do with Nordic happiness. Could the old dismissive arguments about why America could not possibly succeed with the same or similar model you've heard, possibly you're probably like I have time and time and time again, be nothing more than propaganda. Lies promoted by the upper 1%

people who don't in fact care or even want you to join their ranked but instead desperately want to hang on to a corrupt system that not only makes nearly impossible for you to ever join them but leaves you continually vulnerable to falling lower in the rankings

with no safety net between you and the soul crushing deep poverty that lies at the very bottom. People who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo because while it might not benefit the bottom 99% very much, And it definitely doesn't benefit the bottom 50% or even 80%.

It allows billionaires to hoard more of their preposterous amounts of wealth. Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream. I'll plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us. Seriously, why are the people living in an Nordic country so damn happy? They live way too far north with way too little sunlight or warmth during the long winter months

to have any right to be. And yet, since the World Happiness Report first came out in 2013, Finland, Norway, Denmark, one of those three countries have claimed the top spot every single year, with the exception of Switzerland, which won barely in 2015. That same year, the Nordic countries of Iceland, Denmark, and Norway did claim the second, third, and fourth spots. At least three of the top five spots have been Nordic countries every single year. and Finland specifically has won every year since 2018.

But says who? Who the fuck are the world happiness report people? What is it? What exactly does it measure? Well, the annual report is published by the University of Oxford's Well-Being Research Center in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and their editorial board there at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Hmm!

University of Oxford, huh? I've heard of that college. I've heard of that university, I guess. But do they provide a better education than, say, Phoenix Online? Prager U. ITT. Yeah, they seem to. The University of Oxford, based in Oxford, England,

is the oldest university in the English-speaking world, and the world's second-oldest university and continuous operation of any language. It's been around since at least 1096 CE, possibly quite a bit longer, written records from England, not great prior to the 11th century. as of October of 2025, 76 Nobel Prize laureates,

four fields medalists, six Turin Award winners have matriculated, worked, or held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford. Its alumni have won 160 Olympic medals, and Oxford is home to a number of the world's most prestigious scholarships, including the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the oldest international graduate scholarship programs in the world. So I guess they're kind of legit.

Oxford has also been ranked as one of the best, or the very best, university in the world by all kinds of publications from U.S. News and World Report to Times Higher Education year after year for as long as reports have been made. So, you know, according to a bunch of the world's most educated people and most decorated academics, they might be like the best or something.

So probably pretty solid ranking system. Maybe not like Alex Jones or David Ike level scholarship. but close. And what is this report? Well, it measures the admittedly subjective state of a meat sacks' overall well-being by asking people to evaluate their current lives on a scale of zero to ten, a scale known as the Cantrell ladder. And the Cantrell ladder is a widely used psychological tool that measures well-being by asking respondents to imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. The top represents the best possible life. The bottom represents the absolute worst.

how many people are asked this question? A lot. They've been pretty thorough with the shit. Well, the exact number of people in countries surveyed varies year to year. A year to year. I think it said ear to ear. It varies ear to ear. Some people hear 100 people.

Some people hear a million. I know it varies year to year. But in general, well over 100,000 people in total from around 140 countries and territories participate each year. In most countries, approximately 1,000 people are contacted by telephone or their interviewed face-to-face. However, all of the people in every country are interviewed only in Finnish, which some believe gives Finland a distinct advantage since almost zero people outside of that country understand even a single fucking word of their strange language. No kidding. Everyone is interviewed

in their native tongue. The World Happiness Report studies all the answers, gives the nation's rankings based off of them, then tries to explain the rankings by assessing six key variables. assumed by a team of scholarly experts to have the greatest impact on a citizen's happiness starting with GDP per capita. And I shouldn't just say assume. They put a lot of work into this. GDP per capita measures a country's economic output per person calculated by dividing its total gross domestic product by its population. This metric is primarily used to gauge the average standard of living and economic well-being within a nation. They also look at overall social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption.

The United States highest ever ranking, 11th place achieved in both 2011 and 2012. Since that peak, the U.S. has experienced a gradual decline in the global rankings. In recent years, it fell out of the top 20 entirely, landing at 23rd in the latest report. Why so low? Well, have you gone outside recently? Have you watched the news?

Have you been on social media at all? even for 10 seconds in the past couple years. Societal anger seems anecdotally to me to be at the highest levels in my lifetime. We're not overall the nation of happy campers right now. We haven't been in happy campers for a while. Researchers note that the long-term drop in the U.S. ranking is primarily being driven by a sharp decline

in life satisfaction among younger Americans under the age of 25. And that makes sense to me. Shit is pretty fucked right now for a lot of Americans. Shit has been fucked for a long time and keeps getting more fucked. And that's going to be most depressing for the young, right? For some of us, we've been at this party for a while.

And for a long time, you know, it's a good party. Cake had plenty of beer in it. Music was fucking fire. There were still lots of hot single people to maybe hook up with. But for many people just getting to the party now, well, for them the keg is dry. The stereo is glitched out. Now the only music is coming from some weird guy with an accordion

who no one seems to remember ever inviting. And the only single person left to try and hook up with is that weird guy with the accordion. Entry level home ownership is currently at its most unaffordable point in U.S. history. Roughly 75% of all homes are out of reach for a median income buyer. The typical first-time buyer is now 40 years old

and the market share for these buyers has plummeted to a record low of about 21%. It's also currently the most expensive it has ever fucking been in U.S. history to afford health insurance. So that's fun. In nominal dollars, health insurance costs in the U.S. are at an all-time high. For example, the average employer-sponsored family plan reached nearly $27,000 in 2025,

and premium rates across ACA marketplace plans and job-based coverage continue to climb. The cost of higher education when adjusted for inflation is also very near an all-time high. It peaked around 2012, but has declined only very slightly since then. Over the last 30 years, average inflation adjusted tuition at public four-year schools has roughly doubled. According to global metrics and a litany of public surveys, the perception of government corruption in the United States is right now at its worst level ever on record.

In Transparency International's Global Corruption Perceptions Index, the U.S. score fell to a historic low of 64 out of 100. This ongoing decade-long decline drops the U.S. to 29th place globally, tied with countries like the Bahamas. Experts attribute this negative trend to political polarization, threats to checks and balances, weakened ethical norms, oh yeah,

and the blurring of lines between public office and private business, business, and business, and business. No, public office and private business. Yeah, yeah, the grift is fucking real, and more and more Americans

are starting to notice. In short, Americans, especially young Americans, with the longest runway ahead of them are on average, fucking pissed off and not happy. And for some very good reasons. So why are those Nordic fuckers so happy?

What are they so happy about? Why do they think they have it so damn good? Well, to get to that answer, let's first dispel some myths contradicting the idea of Nordic happiness. Acting like these rankings have to be bullshit because they simply can't be that happy up there near the North Pole for several reasons. Starting with that weather. The Nordic countries, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Finland do not, in case your real bad with geography have a pleasant tropical climate. They don't have that pleasant tropical weather that many of us associate with happiness.

I know that when I think of a paradise, I usually have the word tropical to the front, not Nordic. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say, I want to live in a Nordic paradise. But maybe they should. When I pictured some type of tropical paradise, I pictured some peaceful island near the equator, it's sunny, somewhere between 75 and 80 degrees during the day,

you know, dropping down into the low 60s at night so I can get a good night's sleep, light breeze, a place with abundant, tasty-ass fruit like mangoes, white sand beaches, warm crystal clear, bright blue water, protected from sharks and other creepy critters by protective reef or some shit. So it's fun to swim in. No giant, weird bugs in my paradise, no leeches, no alligators or crocs. Just like a cute little squirrel-like creatures and birds that kind of shut the fuck up for the most part. And don't shit too much. And lots of nice, sweet fish. I would describe them as sweet. with no sharp teeth.

They're brightly colored. Happy. They're happy looking. They got a little tiny mouths. They don't look like they can even bite anything like it wouldn't even be possible. They're delicious. A lot of white flaky meat on them, not fatty at all. This place has coconuts.

A lot of coconuts. Grass-fed beef. Grass-fed bacon, if that's the thing. My wife's nearby drinking a margarita, wearing a string bikini. That's the vibe I want. What I don't picture is freezing, Glacial-fed ocean water blasting violently against a rock outcropping.

It looks like it probably has a crack and hiding underneath it. You know, there's a dark, ominous sky above. It's been overcast for the past three weeks straight. I don't picture myself eating unsalted, air-dried cod. You know, a couple of tart lingenberries. I'll sit near a fire to keep from, you know, dying of hypothermia. And I'm next to some stoic motherfucker named Sven. While Nordic summers do have a lot of sunlight, due to the high latitude,

I'll give them that. You have to survive the Nordic Worm. winters to get to those summers. Winters that tend to be very long, dark and cold. In Finland's biggest city, in capital of Helsinki, they get less than six hours of daylight on the winter solstice. It's generally about 25 degrees Fahrenheit while that sun's out for that short amount of time. That doesn't feel like a smile-inducing dopamine-producing paradise to me.

But how much does the weather actually factor into a person's overall estimate of happiness? Not much, it turns out, which I found surprising at first. people based on years of studies do account for changes in weather in their evaluations of life satisfaction with too hot, too cold, too rainy, you know, weather decreasing life satisfaction. However, effect sizes for changes in weather tend to be very small and are complicated by people's expectations regarding seasonal patterns. For example, people in the tropics are found to be happier during the winter, but are less happy during the rainier spring as compared to people in more temperate zones. people in many colder climates tend to be happier during the summer with longer days and more sunshine than the winter. However, as long as the weather pattern follows pretty much what they expect it to, the weather doesn't really affect their happiness that much. Basically, if they expect it to be cold and gray from December through March and then it is, they're fine.

But if they expect the weather to improve dramatically in April and May, but then it doesn't, well, now they're pissed and or depressed and or sad. But not for long in most cases. Essentially, weather is something people are dead. to, and thus typically, excuse me, it doesn't much affect the life satisfaction of those used to any given type of weather. And I guess that makes sense, right? If dark, rainy days really, really brought a lot of people down, Seattle would lose half or so of its population to suicide every gray rainy winter. This relationship or lack thereof between weather and overall happiness is why Nordic weather doesn't lead many Nordic people to attach low scores to happiness on that canterral ladder. But doesn't that bad weather increase suicide rates? And if your

country has higher suicide rates, how happy can your country really be? Well, Nordic countries, especially Finland, used to have relatively high suicide rates in 1970s and 1980s, which fueled a persistent rumor that bad weather equals miserable people losing their will to live. However, those rates have declined sharply since those days, even though the weather patterns have remained essentially the same, and nowadays the report in suicide rates in the Nordic countries are very close to the European average and also very similar to rates in France, Germany, and the U.S. Interestingly, although wealthy countries in general, such as the Nordics, tend to have higher suicide rates than poor countries, once basic needs you're met, maybe more people have more time to ponder

the meaning of life and don't always like the conclusions they come to, the same factors that predict higher life satisfaction tend to predict lower suicide rates. For example, higher national levels of social capital and quality of government predict both higher subjective well-being and lower suicide rates, while higher divorce rates predict more suicides and lower life satisfaction, although quality of government seems to have bigger effects on life satisfaction and divorce than on suicide. Basically, the assertion that Nordic people can't be happier because of higher suicide rates is based on outdated information, as Nordic suicide rates are not especially high and are well predicted by the theoretical models where the same factor,

contribute to both higher life satisfaction in the Nordics and to lower suicide rates. Recent studies place Finland's suicide rate at 14.6 per 100,000 people, while the recent rate in the U.S. is 14.5 per 100,000. So clearly, the weather is not killing Scandinavians at some alarming rate. Well, what about the people who might say that the only reason Nordic countries are happier is because they have less immigrants? And therefore, it's somehow easier for them to be happy. because, you know, ethnically, they're kind of all the same.

Let's again look at the stats. I trust carefully gathered data a lot more than unfounded opinions and or people parroting back the opinions that they have heard from others, no matter how confidently they tossed them out. In 2020, roughly 19% of the population of Sweden was born outside of the country. One in five, Swedes were recent immigrants. More than 50.2 million immigrants live in the U.S. right now, which is the highest in the nation's history. Still, this foreign-born population only makes up about 14.8% of the total

U.S. population. Finland, though, pretty Finnish. Approximately 87% of the population identifies as ethnic Finnish. 5% are Swedish-speaking Finns. Still, a lack of ethnic diversity. Is that really a hallmark of happiness? No fucking way. Think about this. North Korea is the least ethnically diverse country in the world. How happy do you think those motherfuckers are right now? They don't even participate in the United Nations-sponsored World Happiness Report because their authoritarian dipshit government would never let anyone answer anonymously or honestly. If they did, anyone not giving North Korea a perfect fucking score would probably be murdered.

Japan is also one of the least ethnically diverse nations in the world, and yet Japan's highest ever position in the UN's World Happiness Report was actually 43rd. I thought it would be higher. It achieved that in 2014. It's been lower ever since. Clearly, ethnic homogeneity. Oh, my gosh, that word just kills me. Ethnic homogeneity.

Homo, homogeneity. There we go. Ethnic homogeneity. Oh, what syllable do I pronounce? Clearly, ethnic homogeneity does not magically equate to happiness. Also, homogeneity, I don't like the way that word sounds. It doesn't feel correct to me, you know, because I'm so used to saying homogenous. And I want to go, ha, homogeneity, but apparently not.

Some empirical studies have found that increased ethnic diversity is associated with reduced overall trust. This is often been attributed to ethnically diverse societies, having more difficulty generating and sharing public goods. But researcher, Eric Uslaner, professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, and author of nine books, has analyzed and presented data illustrating that it is a lot of, is not ethnic diversity per se, but rather ethnic residential segregation that undermines trust. Corroborating this, other recent research has demonstrated that the economic inequality between ethnic groups, rather than any cultural or linguistic barriers, seem to explain this effect of ethnic diversification leading to less public goods. Basically, if two ethnic groups aren't

living in a mixed neighborhood, but rather in separate neighborhoods, and one neighborhood, they're doing a lot better than the other. Now people are going to be more likely to talk shit and other each other, right, and be like, well, well, they're poor and the crime is higher over there because of blank. And, well, they're rich and there isn't as much crime over there because of blank. But if everyone is doing about the same, living the same lifestyle and the same neighborhood, well, then instead of people othering a different ethnic group and distrusting them, and now they're more likely just think of them as neighbors, right? It's no longer, well, well, those black people over there or, you know, those white people over there,

you know, it's more of, oh, that's Mark over there. Yeah, that's Mark. And, oh, that's Candace over there. Yeah, that's Candace used to say hi. Some Nordic countries have a much more diminished history regarding racial segregation compared to the U.S. Perhaps that could help explain why they are happier. You know, not the same type of history.

Racism and xenophobia, you know, they do exist everywhere, including in Nordic countries, but seemingly not to the same degree, not as entrenched. Furthermore, researchers, Nicholas, Sheron and Bo Rothstein, prominent political scientists best known for their foundational work on the quality of government and its direct impact on corruption, societal cohesion, and generalized trust have shown that the effect of ethnic diversity on social trust becomes negligible when controlling for quality of government, indicating that in countries of high-quality institutions such as the Nordic countries, ethnic diversity might not have any effect on social trust. And according to the analysis in the World Happiness Report 2018, the ratio of immigrants, within a country was found to have a statistically negligible effect on the average level of happiness of those locally born. With the 10 happiest countries having foreign-born population shares that averaged 17.2% roughly twice the world average. Other studies have tended to find a small positive rather than negative effect of immigration on the well-being of locally born populations.

So ethnic homogeneity thus provides no explanation of Nordic. happiness and immigrants, you know, shouldn't be blamed for unhappiness in places like America, according to this, right? Also, World Happiness Report analysis has found that immigrants within a country tend to be about as happy as people born locally. So I thought all that was very interesting. Given that the Nordic countries are renowned for their unique welfare state model of government with extensive social benefits, a natural candidate to explain Nordic happiness would be this governmental system. However, early analysis, quantifying welfare as an aggregate measure of government welfare spending like the percentage of GDP devoted to public welfare programs tended to find no link between welfare expenditure and happiness or even a negatively correlated link.

Government spending as such thus seems not to be clearly linked to greater or worse life satisfaction, which is no surprise given that government spending is tightly linked to economic cycles and demographic changes rather than an adequate measure for tracking the distribution and redistribution of goods. and services within a society. More recent work has tended to operationalize the welfare state in terms of the benefits. In-kind and in-cash offered to citizens rather than mere spending as proportion of GDP because the latter does not tell what the state actually spends on what it provides for its citizens, which makes sense. In a longitudinal study of 18 industrial nations from 1971 all the way to 2002,

researchers Alexander C. Pasek from Texas A&M University and Benjamin Radcliffe from the University of Notre Dame, prominent political scientists renowned for their cross-national empirical research on the economics of happiness. These two, smarty-panses, examined welfare state generosity by using an index capturing the extent of emancipation from market dependency in terms of pensions, income maintenance for the ill or disabled, and unemployment benefits. And they found that welfare state generosity exerted a positive and significant impact on life satisfaction. Positive and significant for welfare state generosity, which makes sense. I mean, if you don't only feel like your government is taking care of you, but you can actually point to the many real actions

that they have taken in that regard, like covering your medical bills, helping you with housing, giving you a high-quality, advanced education for free, which then helped you get a good, paying stable job with plenty of time off and say a pension, well, you're going to be fucking happier. Just like a kid actually being taken care of by nurturing, supportive parent, who follows through on the promises, who goes to games, helps pay for costs associated with playing sports and getting a car, etc. And not by some checked out neglectful fucking deadbeat who's like,

oh, yeah, yeah, I'll be there and then just doesn't show up, right? They're going to be happier. Before we move on to the next study, time for today's first of two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads, please sign up to be a space lizard on Patreon, get the catalog ad-free, these episodes early and more. Thanks for listening to those ads. Now let's look at another study associated with trying to figure out what's made the Nordic people the happiest in the world. Another study that examined OECD, organization for economic cooperation in developing countries, found that indicators such as the extensiveness of welfare benefits and degree of labor market regulation had a significant positive association with life satisfaction.

not surprised. If Uncle Sam is making sure you're not living on the street and also that your boss isn't exploiting the fucking shit out of you, well, then you're going to be happier. The study also found that this effect is not moderated by people's income, meaning that both poor and rich individuals and households benefit from more extensive government, or, you know, better, you know, more productive extensive government, right? Imagine that.

Not sure why so many Americans seem to feel that if they're doing really well, the government helping those less fortunate than them is going to somehow fuck them up. And now they're going to be buried in so many extra taxes that are going to take care of these lazy poor people that they won't be rich anymore, right? That they might, you know, gosh dang, have to have their countertopping made out of granite and not Italian marble. You know, that's what's going to be installed in the new custom kitchen and their new custom 4,000 square foot mansion on an acre lot on the golf course next to the 18th hole in the gated community. What will the neighbors think? income security in case of unemployment also plays a strong role in determining life satisfaction as both unemployment and fear of unemployment strongly affect quality of life.

Yeah, of course. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it fucking helps. If you're broke or you're worried about very quickly becoming broke, if you lose your job, it is harder to be happy. Furthermore, using Gallup World Poll Data, Japanese psychologist and author Shiga Hiro Oishi, the Marshall Field for Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, a man considered a foremost authority on happiness, meaning, and culture, and a team of researchers working underneath him demonstrated that the positive link between progressive taxation and global life evaluation is fully mediated by citizen satisfaction with public and common goods such as health care, education, and public transportation. That the progressive taxation helps to fund, right? Totally. if you're paying taxes and more than people in most countries,

you don't want to see a bunch of potholes. You don't want to have to walk 10 miles to work or take out a fucking payday loan to pay for meds to treat a sinus infection. You want to see the money that you've been paying in taxation coming back to you and the people around you and, you know, in real ways, you know, infrastructure and health care, education, et cetera,

and not just paying for foreign wars and subsidizing corporate bailouts for billionaires and subsidizing foreign nations. These and other studies suggest that one big secret to Nordic happiness is the institutional framework of the Nordic welfare state. That people tend to be happier in countries where there's easy access to relatively generous welfare benefits and where the labor market is regulated to avoid employee exploitation.

So let's push pause now in our overall assessment of why Nordic countries are the happiest and really look into their type of government. Have you ever found yourself curious, about the Nordic style of government. I have been for a long time, and I'm not alone. America's interest in the Nordic model, also sometimes called the Scandinavian model,

since Americans often use the terms interchangeably to refer to again, the countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Finland started way before the Nordic countries began topping the list of the world's happiest countries year after year after year. Nearly a century ago, now back in the 1930s, while America was struggling to the Great Depression,

American journalist Marcus Childs praised the Nordic political model, referring to Scandinavian government's interesting mixing of market economies and government welfare programs as a middle way, a beautiful blend of both capitalism and socialism, a way for citizens to still be able to accumulate mind-boggling amounts of personal wealth while simultaneously providing the rest of the citizenry an important safety net, to not fall into bankruptcy and then homelessness when the factory closes or when the hospital turns over astronomical inflated bills to bill collectors. and there are plenty of very wealthy people in the Nord of countries, by the way, dispelling the pervasive American myth that you can't get ahead there. This one Finnish dude, Karl, heki Kostela Karl Heke Kostela Found, maybe if I say it that way.

Carl Heke Kostela! He founded a, very patronizing. He founded a dental equipment company in the 1970s, and now he's worth over $2 billion U.S. dollars. Seems like it worked out pretty fucking well for him. Carl's doing good. Finland has seven billionaires in a nation of 5.6 million people

and they have over 100,000 people with over a million U.S. dollars each. Sweden has almost six, that was a weird way to see millionaires, by the way. They have over 100,000 millionaires. Sweden has almost 600,000 millionaires, almost 8% of Denmark's entire population are millionaires,

roughly 8% of Norwegians, also millionaires. Now, does the U.S. have more millionaires per capita? Yeah, but actually not a lot more percentage-wise. Roughly 10% of people in the U.S. are worth a million or more dollars, but the other 90% plus of the population in Nordic countries, they have a much higher quality of life and they're far better taken care of than the lower 90% of the people in the U.S.

There is no Skid Row equivalent in the Nordic countries. Like, not at all. There are no large semi-permanent tentities, no big sprawling slums. And I'm getting a bit off track now, So I'll refocus on why so many Americans don't want to admit that Nordic governments are doing a better job than our government is. If you define government, their primary responsibility is taking care of its people and making sure that his people have a great chance at achieving happiness, which I do, as did founding father Thomas Jefferson. In 1809, he wrote, the care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government. Do you feel like your government truly cares for you right now?

is your happiness being prioritized? So why don't we embrace the system that sure fucking seems like a better one? Well, let's get historical again. Early American public fascination with Scandinavian policies remained high while New Deal government programs were popular. But beginning in the 1950s, radical right politicians in the U.S. began to criticize the Scandinavian model.

Why? On the surface, it was a way of fighting back against progressives who were campaigning on platforms calling for crazy shit, like increased equity, increased spending on government social programs that helped working class families, single parent households, et cetera. You know, just fucking nonsense.

Sounds close to charity. Gross. What would Jesus do? I think definitely helped the poor, right? Like 100%. Definitely for sure, since that's kind of what he was literally all about, actually. Even I know that.

The tried and true political strategy of spreading propaganda about some random foreign country and making the lives of their citizens seem far worse than they actually are to better your own domestic political argument and stoke nationalist fires seem to work again, right, like it almost always does. In 1960, even President Dwight D. Eisenhower fired a shot at the Scandinavian model as part of his campaigning to help his vice president Republican candidate Richard Nixon in his race against then-Massachusetts Senator JFK. At a big convention on July 1960, Eisenhower made a seemingly throwaway comparison to a fairly

friendly European country. He had supposedly been reading about in unnamed sources, and he claimed that the country's quote, experiment of almost complete paternalism resulted in skyrocketing suicide rates and over double the U.S. rate of alcoholism.

They're just falling apart. Not sure which Nordic country he was talking about. It seems like he just pulled that out of his ass. But if Finland had more drunk people than the U.S. did then, they don't now. The percentage of people with alcohol use disorder in Finland is roughly, 9.1% the U.S. 13.9%. Also, total per capita alcohol consumption in Finland, roughly 8.7

liters of pure alcohol per year. By comparison, U.S. per capita consumption sits around 10 liters per year. So we are drinking more. Eisenhower's comments did not go unnoticed. The Scandinavian countries quickly figured out who his comments were supposedly referring to, more or less. Some became quite upset. Norway's prime minister, Einar Gerr, Gerr, of the Labor Party called on the U.S. Congress to investigate Eisenhower's critique. Swedes were probably the most upset, as most Scandinavian newspapers considered Sweden, the most likely country Eisenhower was referring to, when a reporter told the popular Swedish prime minister, Tage Erlander, about Eisenhower's comments, Erlander was apparently amazed that, quote,

Eisenhower had not taken the trouble to know what he was talking about when he drew his conclusions about conditions in the Nordic countries. Erlander had led the nation for 14 years at that point. Sweden had experienced unprecedented growth and prosperity during that time. His social democratic party's ideology had become the accepted and heralded norm in the country. Eisenhower clearly saw Sweden's strong government as paternalism, the practice of limiting in individuals or groups' freedom or autonomy for their own good, basically plain daddy to a nation's citizens.

But Erlander pushed back on that notion, claiming, in Sweden, our policy has been based on increasing personal freedom. He also calmly, logically, stobically, as the Swedish do, responded to Eisenhower's wild alcoholism and suicide claims by saying, Juvenile delinquency, misuse of alcohol, and the other difficulties cited are international problems. And the United States itself is a relevant example of this. Doesn't seem like the U.S. was in a position, statistically, to be standing on a moral high horse there. Even a conservative-leaning Swedish newspaper, Stockholm's, uh, Svenskine, dog blot-oh my gosh dog blitit this is dog blotet dog blotet swenska dogletit

uh would join in on uh i'm just only making myself laugh which is my mock rave when i just can't pronounce something i should just in a foreign language i just make a funny voice uh even this newspaper would join in on critiquing eisenhower's comments the editor would first write that perhaps we find it difficult to recognize ourselves in isenhower's version even we who for example believe that the climate in this country could be made significantly more favorable for business and that drunkenness, despite many encouraging signs in the statistics of sobriety is a deeply serious problem. A little side note, but in comparison to the over-the-top political attacks in the U.S. today, a senior conservative in Sweden refer to themselves simply as someone that believes

their country could be made significantly more favorable for business, feels almost absurdly understated. The editor would then go on to poke some fun at Eisenhower writing, we Swedes must be forgiven if we entertain a quiet hope that he consult a reference book appropriate for heads of state and very large countries. Fucking mic drop, bitch. Very nice way of saying he was talking out of his ass. Two years later, 1962, Eisenhower would actually visit Sweden

and apologize for those comments. The crowd would cheer and seem to adore him by the time he was done. They still liked Ike. Now let's really define that Nordic model I keep talking about what not necessarily doing. After today's second and two mid-show sponsor, breaks. Thanks for listening to the sponsors. Now this return, actually define the Nordic model.

The Nordic model is a term that refers to the shared characteristics of the five Nordic countries of, again, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland. Summarized very simply, it refers to a capitalist economy with relatively high taxation, but also with universal welfare benefits. And benefits in Finland include health care. All permanent residents are entitled to public health care services, heavily subsidized, or free of charge, as well as reimbursements for medications and private treatments. Education. Public education is free at all levels, including universities and students receive universal

financial support for living and housing costs. Family and maternity support. Every newborn family gets a maternity grant, universally known as the maternity pack, a box full of baby essentials or a cash equivalent. It also includes extensive paid parental leave for both parents. parents in Finland receive up to 320 working days of paid parental leave. The mother also gets another 40 working days of separate pregnancy leave before the birth. All paid.

Pensions, all residents who reach a certain age receive a national flat rate pension to guarantee an adequate minimum income in retirement. And finally, social assistance, what we hear in the U.S. would call welfare individuals whose income and assets do not cover essential daily living expenses can receive basic social assistance. before moving forward, has this style of government created some type of dystopian shithole state where unemployment rates are off the charts where fucking 80% of the population is just living on the land I ain't working anymore, fuck you! I just drunk all day for the rest of my life!

Is that what's happening? Because that's the rumor, right? Right? That if America did this, a bunch of people would just be working their ass off, or I guess like a small group of people working their ass off, just paying a fuckload of taxes so everybody else, the majority could just, you know, ride for free on their lazy asses. Well, that is not how things have worked out in the Nordic countries.

Finland's unemployment rate has averaged 10.5% in 2026, which is over twice as high as the U.S. rate of 4.2. However, Norway's unemployment rate 4.4% compared to the U.S. rate of, again, 4.2. And they have no national debt at all and all those social welfare benefits. And Norway has even more benefits than Finland, thanks to Norway's massive oil wealth. Denmark citizens get virtually all those same benefits as well, but their unemployment rates only 2.7%, much lower than the U.S.

So clearly, taking care of your people, even when they are out of a job, does not lead to a ton of deadbeats, just quitting their jobs, kicking back, letting the state and other people's tax burdens take care of them if you do this intelligently. Right? So many lies. I have been told. We have been told so many lies

about all this shit for my whole fucking life. Back to define the Nordic system of government again now. The Nordic countries have multi-party parliamentary systems with strong social democratic parties, key word being democratic, please not fall for even more propaganda and think that social democratic equates to communism because it definitely does not. They also have strong unions and cooperation between employers and trade unions is not frequently disparaged like it is here in the U.S. It's common and it's encouraged. And it's worked out. every single Nordic country carries comparatively less debt than the U.S., I should add.

The traditional Nordic model reached its peak in the 1960s. Some aspects of it, you know, have weakened since the 1990s. The model has transitioned from a collective focus, more left-leaning to a more individualistic one, more right-leaning. Why? Well, let's theorize that the politicizing of the Cold War did not help the popularity of the more outright socialist aspects of the model, but commitment to some form of welfare state, you know, project clearly. where the poor are not villainized, but instead are empathized with and more taken care of, remain strong among the nation's populations, as I have shown.

All five of these countries have very high levels of public trusts, that is, faith in government institutions, actually working on behalf of the people, and also a ton of individual freedom. And speaking of freedom, you know, people define it differently. While the U.S. emphasizes freedom from government interference with extensive rights like gun ownership, nor do countries prioritize freedom to via social safety net. right consequently nordic nations like norway sweden and denmark consistently rank higher in overall individual freedom indexes certain freedoms like like freedom of the press you know uh quality of life indexes than the u.s does on a variety of uh you know global indexes again i'm going to say index

a million times nordic countries interestingly also regularly uh top the world press freedom index or is that word again published by reporters without borders with nations like norway and Sweden claiming the top two spots. They boast robust freedom of information in speech, although they do place some limits on harassment or hate speech. But overall, I hope it's clear that it's not like, oh, you have to lose all your freedoms. No, you don't.

You actually don't over there. You know, I don't know about you, but, I mean, it seems like the rational thing would be to maybe sacrifice a few guns for everything else in your fucking life being better. For me, maybe not for everybody. The Nordic countries also have very, low levels of corruption and efficient governments, which is why the public trusts them.

Sweden even maintains a strict budget surplus of 1% every economic cycle. Many detractors of the Nordic model point to low military spending as one of the factors that makes it possible for the Nordic countries to offer so many social services. The idea is that the U.S. could never offer the same social services because we shoulder the burden of a high defense budget so that other countries can have low ones, even though we don't have to do that. But how little are Nordic countries actually spending on their militaries? Throughout the Cold War, the Nordic states maintained neutrality for the most part and had very low defense budgets, but they have now started to raise their military budgets because of the threat Russia poses.

Finland and Sweden recently joined NATO. Earlier this year, Sweden's Defense Committee proposed raising their military spending to 2.6 the GDP. As recently as 2014, their military spending was equal to only 1% of their GDP. The proposal to more than double it was incredibly popular within the government. Norway was recently praised by the U.S. Department of Defense for its own plan to raise their defense budget. They spend 2% of their GDP on the military right now, and they plan to double that during the next decade. The U.S. by comparison spends about 2.7 of our GDP on military spending, a number I actually expected to be far higher. That means that by the end of the decade, Norway will actually be spending more of their GDP, percentage-wise, on military spending than the U.S.,

and without any plans to get rid of all their social services. So if the Nordic countries aren't actually spending much less on their militaries in the U.S., their tax rates have to be astronomically higher than ours, right? That is partially correct. However, looking at the tax system in various Nordic countries might surprise some Americans. They do tend to have much higher income tax rates to finance all these public services with the three Scandinavian countries, all having a tax to GDP ratio of around 40 to 45 percent compared to the U.S. U.S. rate of 24.5 percent. And that's a lot more. That's fucking way more, almost twice as much. But not when you look closely at it. These countries tend to vary on some taxes, like a Social Security tax and a capital gains tax. Denmark, for example, doesn't have a Social Security tax,

funding it instead through a portion of income tax funds. And here's where the information gets a little surprising. When it comes to corporate taxes and taxes on the wealthiest citizens, the Nordics are shockingly lax. All of the Scandinavian country's tax brackets top out at the upper middle class. Norway's top tax bracket, the highest out of the three. If you earn over 1.5 times the average Norwegian income or around 90,000 a year, you fall into the top tax bracket Norway. For personal income, the highest statutory marginal income tax rate is 39.6%.

Denmark's top statutory personal income tax rate is higher. 55.9%. Sweden, 52.4.4%. Those are high. Denmark's top tax bracket is for those who earn over 1.3 times a national average. Sweden's, for those who earn over 1.1 times, barely over the national average, the wealthiest Swedes pay just as much in personal income taxes as a slightly above average Swedish citizen. Top tax bracket in the U.S. by comparison applies to those who make over nine times the national average or over $640,000 a year. So is it a little harder to get ahead in the Nordic countries? not necessarily, right, when you look further.

When you compare salaries and taxes between two different countries, when trying to figure out how all that equates to quality of life, you can't just look at how much someone makes and how much they pay in taxes alone. You need to adjust for cost of living and purchasing power parity. Here is a comparison of disposable median income per capita, adjusted for PPP purchasing power parity, between the U.S. and the five Nordic countries. international dollars, which is a hypothetical unit of currency used in economics to equalize purchasing power, which is what really matters across different countries.

The U.S., 19,300. Norway, 22,684. Iceland, also roughly 19,300, same as U.S. Sweden, 20 to 22,000. Same for Finland, 20 to 22,000. Denmark, 21 to 23,000. So people on average fare as well or better in the Nordic countries when it comes to income, when it comes to actual their purchasing power from their income.

It might be easier to go from being very rich to very wealthy in the U.S. Thanks to the ability in America for the wealthy to cheat the tax code and frankly due to more corruption, but it's not harder to go from being poor to being middle class or from being middle class to being rich or from being rich to being very rich in the Nordic countries. Are these Nordic countries trying to stop the hardworking? every man from getting super rich through a high corporate tax, though? No, all of the Scandinavian countries actually have lower corporate taxes in the U.S. The Scandinavian countries' corporate tax rates range from 20 to 22 percent compared to the U.S. tax rate of 25.8%.

One tax the Scandinavians do have that we do not have is a VAT, VAT, VAT or value-added tax. A value-added tax is similar to a sales tax, but the tax is determined by looking at the value-added to a product by each step in the production stage. The Scandinavian countries all have a VAT of 25% and all earn just under 10% of their GDP through the tax. This tax, you know, obviously. While this does account for the high price of goods in Scandinavian countries, it also is described by the Tax Foundation's article on Scandinavian taxes as an economically efficient tax that can raise significant revenue with relatively little harm to the economy. For reference, the Tax Foundation is described as having either a nonpartisan or slightly conservative bias sources,

say either way it is not a propaganda website run by Scandinavian superfans. Back to the point, the VAT is a smart, useful tax that doesn't have a major negative impact on the economy. Shouldn't that mean that every major developed country would have it? You would think, and almost every major country does have a VAT, the loan exception, the U.S. The United States is the only major country to not have a VAT instead opting for state and local sales taxes, and the country collects 2% of our GDP through these taxes.

The possibility of introducing a VAT into the U.S. also has virtually zero support from American policymakers. Now let's look at debt. Is it really possible that all the welfare benefits afforded to Nordic citizens like public daycare, long stretches of maternity and paternity leave, free health care, free university, strong unemployment benefits, and strong Social Security benefits can be financed by moderately high but efficient taxes? or are the Nordic countries financing all of this by having a massive amount of government debt? It might be easier, brush to stomach, if the Nordics were just putting off their welfare costs by going further and further into debt. But that is definitely not what is happening. As I said before, even though we don't get nearly the shit, people in Scandinavia get here in the U.S., the U.S. much deeper in debt,

at least I think I said that before, the three Scandinavian countries all have low, strong debt to GDP ratios of around 30 to 40 percent, and while Iceland and Finland both have debt to GDP, ratios of around 70%, they take their debt rates incredibly seriously. Iceland's relatively high government debt comes from the nation being seriously weakened by the 2008 financial collapse, as Icelandic banking relied on aggressive foreign borrowing. The country experienced near financial ruin, but was able to recover with help from the international monetary fund.

Their debt has gone down from a peak of 92% of their national GDP in 2010, and according to the IMF, Iceland's banking and economic future looks very, very positive. Iceland is also heavily safeguarded their welfare system throughout the crisis, and the IMF credits this as one of the main reasons the country was able to recover so well. You'd think that an expensive welfare system would be the first thing to go during a financial collapse, but keeping the system allowed Iceland to come out of the crisis with low levels of social inequality. Iceland almost overtook Finland for the number one spot in the most recent World Happiness Report, by the way. Finland's debt is more complicated with causes ranging from an aging population to the hit the country took

when Finnish company, a big international company, Nokia fell from its position of being a major international cell phone player. Nokia is quietly staging a massive comeback, by the way. They are highly profitable again after switching focus to building the hardware and software backbone of global telecom and 5G networks and more.

And a lot of Finnish Nokia execs are making millions and millions and millions of dollars. again. You can still, again, get plenty rich in these countries. Back to debt. A 2023 report from the Bank of Finland on the nation's debt is pretty eye-opening in comparison with the U.S. It's brutally honest about the difficulties of an aging population. It's also very matter of fact about the course the government should take with boring but effective solutions like solidifying the national fiscal framework. The U.S. has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 120 percent, over 50 percent higher than Finland's, something you would never guess,

from the difference in the way the two countries treat their debt problems. While Finland looks at it as a national failure that should be fixed as soon as possible, national debt is used by both sides in America as a buzzword, a political topic to argue over, while no progress has been made since Clinton was in office and the budget was balanced. Okay, so based off everything I've said, you would think that it would be easy for everyone to agree on the effectiveness of the Nordic model, but it remains very controversial in the U.S. In 2018, the White House released a report on global socialism and included a section on the Nordic countries,

even though the Nordic countries are actually not fucking socialist. They have socialist programs just like the U.S. does. Social Security? Medicare? Just because some sources invent new fucking words to avoid describing them as being quote-unquote socialist, that is just semantics. They are, in essence, for all practical purposes, a type of social program. the Nordic countries again are not socialist countries because they have capitalist economies

and there would be no reason to include them in a report on global socialism unless you wanted to spread propaganda to make sure the rich keep getting richer and nearly everybody else has a hard time ever getting ahead. The White House report claimed that living standards in Nordic countries were quote, at least 15% lower than living standards in the U.S.

Based on fucking what? That is just a number that somebody pulled out of their ass. That's somebody who was going, do you think they would buy us saying at least 25% lower? Yeah, nah, yeah. No, yeah. I thought that sounded too high. Yeah, no, you're right. Let's go with 15%.

The report, of course, did not include what metric they were based in that percentage off because there wasn't one. They were just fucking making it up. And some Nordic countries noticed. The Danish prime minister, Lars Lucky Rosmussen, I don't think it's pronounced Lucky. Luka, Luka, Larka, Larka, Sousson, shot back writing that in a living standard standards competition, Denmark, quote, would win every time against U.S.

He added, our children can get an education, no matter who you are and where you come from. We can get to the hospital and get help if we get sick. And if you become unemployed, run into problems or otherwise need a helping hand. And then the community is ready to seize and help one back on the right track. After defending his own country, Ross Muson ended with, maybe we should just get better at bragging more about everything we actually do very well. Sassy. The Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025, they published an article in 2022, titled The Myth of Scandinavian Socialism.

The article goes over Sweden's large number of welfare benefits, but then claims that this is only possible because Sweden is, quote, one of the richest countries in the world with a per capita GDP of $52,274 U.S. dollars. You'd think they would include this to say that Sweden's welfare system would not work in the U.S. because we aren't as rich. But right after that in the article, in parentheses, it is written, compared with the U.S. per capita GDP of $63,593. Ah, typical heritage foundation. Their primary heritage is just being so full of shit that I'm surprised turds don't fall out of those fucking mouths, those motherfuckers, every time they open them. If you just read that parenthetical, it's like they're saying that it would actually be far easier to implement a similar welfare system here in the U.S., right? The opposite of their argument. later the report confusingly praises Finland's use of the Nordic system,

writing that Finland has discovered that capitalism works best when employees are paid well. Yeah. And have, quote, access to high-quality public services. Yeah. Does that mean that the Heritage Foundation is in favor of high-quality public services, like government-funded daycares and free universities? No, they definitely aren't. And they go on to attack Finland for having such high tax rates,

almost immediately afterwards. one of the tax rates they mentioned, though, is Finland's corporate tax rate of 20%. If that sounds familiar, it's because when we went through the tax systems in order countries earlier in this episode, we revealed that the U.S. actually has a higher corporate tax rate than that. So typical of groups that just have to stick

to one political ideology instead of, I don't know, trying to figure out what actually serves the people best, whether that's on the left or the right of the political spectrum. mentioning Finland's high corporate taxes as an example of why the U.S. should be careful of adopting the Finnish system, when the U.S. actually has a higher corporate tax rate is just fucking misleading nonsense. The report ends claiming that American leftist politicians want to turn America into a giant Denmark or Sweden. Okay.

It says that to do this, they would have to quote, triple income taxes on everyone. No. Including the middle class to pay for the welfare, initiate a value-added tax of 25% on coffee, beer, chocolate, and other goods, convert our $141 trillion net worth into government. government bonds eliminate all right to work laws and unionize the 90% of workers who do not belong to unions and open our borders to all. What? I can go over all these points individually, but is it even worth arguing with a report that

brings up the U.S.-Mexico border in a discussion on Nordic welfare states? And which Nordic country exactly decided to convert their entire country's net worth into government bonds? Not one. More lies, more propaganda. No country, Nordic or not, has converted its entire net worth into government bonds. Let's move to a New York Post article that's even more insane with its Nordic propaganda. A 2015 article titled, Sorry, Liberals.

That's such a fucking douchy way to open, whether it's conservatives or, sorry, conservatives, sorry liberals, Scandinavian countries aren't utopias? They found some pretty wild issues with the Nordic model. Right after including some of the great welfare benefits, Denmark offers, the author wrote, some 5% of Danish men have had sex with an animal. What? Denmark's productivity is in a decline.

Its workers put in only 28 hours a week, and everybody you meet seems to have a government job. Oh, and as the telegraph put it, it's the cancer capital of the world. No, it's not. But what? The New York Post is fucking garbage. It is truly sad to me that anyone would view them as a reliable news source.

It's just tabloid bullshit. One Danish citizen responded to some of the articles claimed, on a fact-checking website and the absurd 5% of Danish men have fucked an animal claim apparently comes from a single veterinarian guest, some looney tune that was on a Danish daytime television show

one time saying something shocking. Great, that's a great source. That's a fantastic source. A reputable Danish newspaper that actually looked into claims about Danish bestiality found that a lot of those rumors came from Russian propaganda attempts

to portray a morally bankrupt Western Europe. That sounds right. The claim that Danish work only work 28 hours a week is also total nonsense. A normal work week in Denmark is considered to be around 37 hours, which sounds pretty nice. The article also talks about the Danish healthcare system and claims that in Denmark, quote, pharmacies are in, excuse me, are a state-run monopoly, which means getting an aspirin is like a trip to the DMV. Here we go again with the propaganda.

We turn again to the helpful but understandably frustrated Danish citizens fact-checking to tell us that Danish pharmacies actually are not state-run at all. Any private citizen just needs an appropriate amount of education and a state certification to operate a pharmacy to common sense requirements. You can also buy aspirin at Danish supermarkets. Also, besides not being state run, the other reason Danish pharmacies are nothing like the DMV is because the Danish government is nothing like the DMV. The Danish government, like all the other Nordic governments, is much more efficient than any part of the American bureaucratic system. my best friend from childhood Kyder Wilson he beat cancer

he had Hodgkin's lymphoma did not know he had it until he started to cough up blood when he was around 24 was riddled with fucking tumors it was very late stage he detected it late because he grew up very poor

like I did in Riggins we did not go to the fucking doctor hardly ever he was even poor he never had health insurance almost never went to the doctor but then he got married had a kid with a Danish woman

moved to Denmark and then got two years of cancer treatment for free and beat it. Also then got a free master's degree. Still lives there. Fucking loves it. Longer he's been away from the states, the more fucking insane he thinks her government is. Let's move on to another article, a 2019 New York Times op-ed.

Two American expats, Trevor Corson, and Partonan, seemed to believe that capitalism is actually doing better in Finland than in the U.S. That capitalism is. They wrote that instead of seeing programs like free health care and tuition-free college as the cornerstones of some kind of Marxist communism, the Finns see them as, quote, the bare basics required for any business-friendly nation to compete in the 21st century.

They think these programs help Finland achieve capitalistic success in the global marketplace. How? They reference a study by Finnish researchers that showed that Finland's capitalist growth and dynamism have been helped, not hurt by the nation's commitment to providing a generous and universal public services

that support basic human well-being. These services have buffered and absorbed the risks and dislocations. caused by capitalist innovation. Basically, they've argued that if you know you have a safety net to fall back on, you're going to be more willing to take big swings, right? Big risks when it comes to business innovation. Because if you don't succeed, right, you don't lose everything and you can try again.

That makes total sense to me, right? You're going to be more aggressive, not less. Trevor and even a title of their article, Finland, is a capitalist paradise. Seems like they're pretty happy there. And it makes sense that a safe and supported population would actually be productive workers. but that is not the path America has taken. American workers constantly face the risk that if a few things go wrong,

despite being hardworking, despite having worked hard for years, they could be financially fucking ruined. That's such bullshit. This combined with a lack of education compared to countries like the Nordic countries, well, it makes Americans more prone to radical ideologies like all the insane conspiracies to keep floating around and keep people distracted

from focusing on the real fucking issues. Another issue with the lack of education in the U.S. is how it affects corruption levels. Access to high-quality tuition-free universities and order to countries helps make them some of the least corrupt countries in the world because they're an educated society. An American study from 2018 found that high education levels and low corruption levels go hand in hand.

As, quote, educated people are more likely to complain against official misconduct and to complain more effectively. Bingo. Basically, an educated population keeps the government in check by actually making reasonable complaints that have turned it into a fucking wild anti-government conspiracy nuts. This is something the Nordic countries have done successfully for decades, and it has resulted in Nordic citizens having governments

that actually fucking work in their best interest. If we only had this in America, and we deserve to have it, we are such an industrious nation. The average American works hundreds of hours more annually than not just all the Nordic country citizens, but most Europeans, but we get less for it. surveys show that between 52% and 65% of U.S. adults live paycheck to paycheck right now. Up to 78% of Americans rely on their next paycheck to cover basic expenses and lack sufficient emergency funds.

An estimated 40 to 50% of working age Americans are not saving enough to maintain their current standard of living in retirement. Furthermore, nearly half of all households have no dedicated retirement savings and an estimated 92% fall short of conservative savings targets for their specific age and income. all of this and so much of the other shit I went over today, it doesn't have to be this way, right? We could stop subsidizing foreign governments, stop funding foreign wars that are almost always about making oil companies, more oil money, and America could actually put Americans first.

We could actually take care of Americans. The U.S. government is not working for the common citizen, has not been for a long time. If only there was another way, what there fucking is. It's right there. It's been there, the Nordic way. The propaganda points against it are just that, propaganda points. How much longer are we going to keep buying that propaganda?

How do we move the needle closer to the Nordic model? Well, we could elect politicians who aren't blatantly corrupt, people who are educated, ethical, at least, you know, pure ethical, want to improve our education system and any of the other public services we currently have. Making services we already have more effective, especially unpopular ones like the DMV and the VA, could lead to Americans being able to trust that new larger programs like government-funded health care, you know, could actually work. The Nordic countries are definitely not perfect. They all have their own unique problems, just like every country in the world does.

But by looking at all the things they have done that have worked incredibly well, we could make productive changes to our own system and improve the lives of average Americans. Right? They're pretty fucking happy over there. The happiest people in the world. And that is largely due, it seems, to their system of government, a government that actually takes care of its own citizenry. Imagine that. Imagine not working all those hours for all those years to still never feel like you're getting ahead,

to still be one medical disaster away from bankruptcy. Imagine having way more time off, a retirement waiting for you, knowledge lingering, you know, physical maladies because you've been able to take care of them. Imagine never having to worry about a hospital bill. Imagine being able to fucking relax and how much happier that would make you. I will end again on that Thomas Jefferson quote, The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

It's all possible, so much as possible, if enough people believe. And that's it for this edition of Time Sucks, Short Sucks. If you enjoyed this story, check out the rest of the Bad Magic Catalog, beefier episodes at Time Suck, Mondays at noon Pacific Time, a new episode to the now long-running paranormal podcast, scared to death, Tuesdays at midnight,

with two episodes of nightmare fuel, fictional horror thrown into the mix each month. Big thanks to my son, Kyler Cummins, for his initial research. Good job, dude. Very fun to collaborate with him. He is finishing up his studies in Germany right now as I record this, another country with lots of rich people.

A lot of nice cars over there. And good social programs. All of that. Imagine that. And thanks to Logan Keith, polishing up the sound of today's episode. Please go to bad magic productions.com for all your bad magic needs.

and have yourself a great week.