Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign is on fire here in the U.S., and he’s managed to make the term “democratic socialism” single-handedly popular, especially among millennials.
The senator often cites Denmark as an example of a country America could take pointers from when it comes to social safety net programs, such as free college, free health care, income equality, as well as other social issues.
“I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway,” Sanders said, “and learn what they have accomplished for their working people.”
“We are not Denmark,” Hillary Clinton responded.
Senator Sanders has long looked to Denmark as a social model of economic fairness and prosperity. In 2013, he played host to the Danish Prime Minister at his home in Vermont. After the visit, Sanders wrote an essay praising the Danes for their progressive thinking government.
“In Denmark, there is a very different understanding of what ‘freedom’ means,” Sanders wrote, arguing the U.S. could learn from the way the Danes have “gone a long way to ending the enormous anxieties that comes with economic insecurity.”
“Instead of promoting a system which allows a few to have enormous wealth, they have developed a system which guarantees a strong minimal standard of living to all — including the children, the elderly and the disabled,” Sanders added.
But is Denmark truly a democratic socialist utopia?
CNN Reporter, Chris Moody traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark to see if the Danes had the key to restoring the American Dream as Sanders seems to believe.
Upon arriving, Moody was surprised to learn that the Danes did not quite share the same idealized perspective of their government as Senator Sanders.
“I would like to make one thing clear,” Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said recently in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
In all fairness, Senator Sanders has explained on many occasions that his brand of “Democratic Socialism” isn’t the same kind of socialism practiced in purely government-controlled countries.
But the scope of the Danes’ social safety net is impressive. Every Danish citizen has access to free child care, health care, paid parental leave from work, a generous pension program, and tuition-free college. Students even receive a paycheck from the government while attending school.
However, the Danes do pay some of the highest tax rates in the world. They have a 25% tax on all goods and services, and a top marginal tax rate that can be as high as 60 percent. The top tax rate in the U.S. is less than 40 percent.
There are also the aspects of Danish society that doesn’t fit Sanders’ policy platform. Since Denmark is a smaller country, they rely heavily on trade. As a result, the government imposes very low tariffs on foreign goods.
Businesses also have much lighter regulation than in the U.S. The corporate tax rate is also considerably lower than America’s rate, which boasts one of the highest in the world.
On top of everything else, Denmark does not have a minimum wage. Most workers do earn a decent to high living wage due to the strength of strong labor unions.
Also, in recent years, Danish citizens decided to elect a more right-of -center government, which started instituting reforms tightening the restrictions on accessing their social safety net programs.
Denmarks unique economy caught the attention of various American policy think tanks. Institutions like The Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation, the Canadian Fraser Institute, and the Cato Institute, have conducted studies on Denmark and have found that the Danes enjoy more economic freedom than the U.S.
“There is this idea that we are a heavily regulated society with a closed economy. The opposite is true,” said Bo Lidegaard, the executive editor-in-chief of Politiken, one of Denmark’s leading newspapers. “If by socialist you mean regulated, restrictive, the individual is not free to do what she or he wants, that is not what we have here. We have a society where the individual is perhaps freer than any other society because the government is securing the social contract so comprehensively.”
Today very few Danish politicians would label their country as “socialist” or even “Democratic Socialist” as Sanders’ calls himself. According to many Danish politicians, over recent years, the word “socialist” has become increasingly unpopular in their country.
“When I hear Bernie Sanders talk about himself as a democratic socialist, it’s a little bit 1970s,” said Lars Christensen, a Danish economist known here as an outspoken critic of his homeland’s model. “The major political parties on the center-left and the center-right would oppose many of the proposals of Bernie Sanders on the regulatory side as being too leftist.”
Republicans and perhaps Hillary Clinton’s campaign may point to those discrepancies and say “See, I told you socialism doesn’t work.” However, whether or not the Danish government is a socialist, one thing is abundantly clear, they value their citizens much more than America values it’s own.
Here’s the video of Moody’s visit.
Featured image screenshot via YouTube
