Sweden's fertility rate has fallen to a historic low of 1,43 children per woman, well below the replacement level of 2,1. Karin Engdahl believes that political reforms are urgently needed to restore young people's faith in the future. She suggests shortening working hours, especially for parents of young children. Without more secure jobs, cheap, good and beautiful housing and efforts to save the climate. and stronger welfare, young people will continue to postpone or refrain from starting a family due to worry and insecurity.
Already at the beginning of the 1900th century, fewer and fewer children were being born in Sweden. The crisis became acute during the 1930s, when poverty spread, unemployment soared and many families could not afford to have children. In the winter of 1932/33, 200 people were unemployed. A third of all children were malnourished. At the same time, families lived in cramped conditions and without bathrooms. It was no wonder that the birth rate became the lowest in the entire Western world.
Population crisis of 1934
The couple Alva and Gunnar Myrdal raised the alarm in their book Kris and the people are asking for help from 1934. They showed that the birth rate drops when families cannot make ends meet. Their solution was clear: society must help ordinary people to be able to live a good life with children. The proposals were many: child benefits, free school lunches, preschools, better housing, cheaper rents and free healthcare. They also suggested that both women and men should be able to work and that children should have the right to good care in the meantime.
It worked. Ten years after the book was published, the birth rate had risen significantly.
Neoliberal policies intentional self-harm
When Sweden introduced neoliberal policies from the 1970s, people actually knew what would happen. Forecasts in school textbooks and government reports predicted that the birth rate would drop. People should have understood why. Insecure jobs, high housing costs and welfare cuts make it harder to start a family – just like in the 1930s. At the same time, we now know what society needs to turn the tide.
If we start from the needs of people and nature and use our free labor, we can build security again. There is no shortage of money – a state with its own currency can create themProgressive taxation, where high-income earners and large companies pay more, can also cause ordinary people and small businesses to pay much less tax even today.
Security, justice and faith in the future make a society grow – also in terms of the number of children.
The state just has to take back money creation from private banks.
In order for the creation of government money not to lead to inflation, as far as I can see, production must increase correspondingly. More money in society needs to be matched by more to buy with this money. That is, a simple tax cut, without anything else, is inflationary, does not create any new actual resources.
But an investment in housing construction, with government money, is a different matter. Then the new money corresponds to something new to buy with the money.
Then it's another matter what to do for all the poor people who have gone into debt to pay for a grotesquely expensive home. With increased housing construction, the value of these homes would decrease and the banks would demand the loans back. Surely we should do like Iceland after the financial crisis, nationalize the banks threatened with bankruptcy, reorganize them and possibly sell them to someone else?
It is enough that there is unused production capacity for there to be no inflation. That is, if the people have unsatisfied needs at the same time as we have good productivity that produces an abundance, there will not necessarily be inflation. History shows that the citizen's wage does not create inflation. And when people who are guest workers abroad send money home, this usually stimulates the economy positively, for example with construction booms. As long as there is unused capacity in the economy, monetary contributions seem to be positive.
That's what I'm saying. You have to use the unused capacity to create something new that can be bought with the extra money. Just more money in the system without more goods is inflationary.
And I am therefore unsure whether just cutting taxes will do any good. OK, people will buy something with the extra money that is left over. Then the question is what. For example, if they demand more housing, without any being built, the price of housing will increase, i.e. inflation.
Incomes below 20-25 per month only go towards survival, so they do not become inflation but maintenance of production.