Bernie Sanders’ utopia needs fixing.
The Denmark that the Democratic Party candidate wants the U.S. to emulate is taking a long, critical look at its welfare model as it decides which bits to scale back.
A government commission now says Denmark needs to cut jobless benefits for graduates as part of a series of tweaks to keep other, more basic welfare services affordable. It follows a push by the previous administration -- a Social Democrat-led coalition that was ousted in June -- that included the introduction of means-testing to limit Danes’ access to state support.
“Welfare is under pressure in Denmark,” Bente Sorgenfrey, a member of the government commission and head of the country’s second-largest trade union, FTF, said in an interview on Monday. “We’re experiencing that all over the place since the crisis, and the absence of funding is putting pressure on payouts.”
Successive Danish governments have pointed to the need for cuts to a system they say grew too bloated in previous decades. Meanwhile economic growth has remained weak as the world’s most indebted households focus on paying back creditors. Denmark’s economy expanded a quarterly 0.5 percent on average between 1991 and 2008. Since then, it’s contracted 0.1 percent per quarter, on average, according to statistics office data.
