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welfare is more difficult. You must imagine that all Veterans’ benefits — housing, health, and hospital service, education, pensions — are available not only to veterans but to all citizens. Then you must imagine a corresponding welfare establishment for women and children, pregnancy care, maternity benefits, child stipends, and day care centres. Then you can add a policy of rents and mortgages that provides quality housing for all and makes sure that the working class has as much left after housing bills are paid as does the middle class. Imagine that one of the more extensive national health insurance schemes promoted by liberal Democrats is fully implemented. And imagine that, in addition, a national health service and a public dental service is in operation.

Welfare in Sweden is virtually concomitant with the expansion of the public sector. Social welfare is the most costly area of expenditure for the Swedish Government, the budget for social services is several times larger than that for defence. The care of children, the aged, and of the sick and handicapped is also very labour consuming. Whether reckoned in crowns or in the number of persons employed, social welfare services have accounted for the heavies items in the expanding public sector since World War II.

During the last half of the l970s, to the planned government expenses for health care, dental work, child care, and care of the aged were added the unplanned expenses for maintenance of employment in ailing industries: textiles, shipbuilding, steel, forestry, among others. To close down production “in socially resposible ways” — to use the politicians’ expression — has proved most expensive, and subsidies to such industries instead of being stop-gap measures, have usually extended over protracted periods of time.

Government spending as percentage of GNP rose from 36 per cent in 1965 to 66 per cent 1980.

Rising welfare costs would have been relatively easy to bear if Sweden had continued aboard the express train of economic growth. The economy’s express ride stopped around 1966, and since then the rate of growth has slowed. Since 1976 the lack of sufficient domestic revenue has been made

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