Nordic countries have an ace up their sleeve that the United States does not: ethnic homogeneity.
To acknowledge the elephant in the room, political discussion of government support policies always comes with a racial dog whistle. The subtext is that the government wants to take your money and give it to those people. It sometimes bubbles to the surface, such as with Reagan's welfare queen in a Cadillac comments, but it is almost never mentioned explicitly.
Before the United States can implement serious welfare reform, including U.B.I., we must solve this nation's racial integration problem.
Though I think UBI can be implemented before or in tandem with fixing our racial issues, here's a quote to expound on this. The Southern Strategy utilized this tactic significantly. From an interview with Lee Atwater[0]:
> All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 . . . and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster...
> You start out in 1954 by saying, "N-----, n-----, n-----." By 1968 you can't say "n-----" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N-----, n-----."
The most interesting thing about many naive Americans' view of the Nordic 'paradise' is the lack of understanding as to how it is able to exist: a small population of homogenous people of similar ethnicity, shared culture, and history that has high GDP per capita and low levels of corruption.
These same people tend to be on the side of unrestricted immigration and mixing of cultures and ethnicity.
What they don't understand is that the average person will not want socialism if it means taking from one group and giving disproportionately to another. This is why America will never successfully have Nordic like social systems, and why some of the Nordic countries themselves (Sweden) are already beginning to show signs that the system will not work if is abused by some groups in ways it wasn't before.
I agree 100% with you w/ regards to the Nordic countries vs the US.
In that same vein, I really believe that there is a huge cognitive dissonance with many in the US, e.g. the majority of Bernie supporters, when it comes to the desire for a Nordic like social system and at the same time continued massive immigration of non-western cultures and ethnicities.
>Before the United States can implement serious welfare reform, including U.B.I., we must solve this nation's racial integration problem.
Of course, that is almost certainly not going to happen anytime soon. Tribalism in humans is not something that can easily be removed.
Just like our industry has that saying, "pick two of three when buying software: done cheaply, done quickly, and done well", we are going to need to accept that nations, at least in the near-term, can pick one of two: "socialism/UBI or massive integration of cultures".
It is common sense that a country cannot afford both. Even tiny Norway, with its vast Oil reserves, will soon have to make the choice.
Events like Brexit, Trump's rise, etc. are different manifestations of this choice being made.
To acknowledge the elephant in the room, political discussion of government support policies always comes with a racial dog whistle. The subtext is that the government wants to take your money and give it to those people. It sometimes bubbles to the surface, such as with Reagan's welfare queen in a Cadillac comments, but it is almost never mentioned explicitly.
Before the United States can implement serious welfare reform, including U.B.I., we must solve this nation's racial integration problem.