Norway charges $120 a month for daycare.
The United States charges ten times that amount. An average of $1,200 a month. In some cities, $2,000. In some places, more than rent. In some families, more than a mortgage.
Norway provides 49 weeks of paid parental leave at full salary. The United States provides zero. The only developed nation on Earth with no guaranteed paid leave.
Norway’s maternal mortality rate is among the lowest in the world. The United States has the highest in the developed world. A woman in America is more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in almost any other wealthy nation.
The difference is not culture. It is not values. It is money. Specifically, where the money goes.
The conservative argument against social programs is always the same. High taxes destroy freedom. The government takes your money and wastes it. The free market is more efficient.
The data says the opposite.
Norway’s top income tax rate is roughly 50 to 60 percent. The United States top rate is 37 percent. On paper, the Norwegian pays more. In reality, the American pays more.
The Norwegian pays taxes and gets healthcare, childcare, education, and paid leave. The American pays taxes and gets a military, corporate subsidies, and debt interest. Then the American pays again for healthcare, childcare, and education.
The Norwegian pays once. The American pays twice.
The United States spends more on healthcare than any nation on Earth, yet, ranks last among developed nations in health outcomes. The Norwegian pays through taxes and gets care. The American pays through insurance premiums, deductibles, copays, and taxes, and still goes bankrupt. The system is not efficient. It is a toll booth on the road to survival.
Why does US daycare cost $2,000 a month? Because it is a for-profit industry. The daycare corporation takes a cut. The insurance company takes a cut. The real estate investor takes a cut. The administrative layer takes a cut. Every hand extracts profit. The parent pays for all of it.
Why does Norway charge $120 a month? Because childcare is a public good. The state subsidizes it. The profit extraction is eliminated. The parent pays a nominal fee. The rest is covered by taxes already paid.
The conservative says high taxes destroy freedom. The data says that high taxes buy freedom.
The Norwegian worker can quit a bad job without losing healthcare. The American worker stays in a toxic workplace because leaving means losing insurance. The Norwegian parent can have a child without calculating whether they can afford daycare. The American parent calculates and often decides against it. The Norwegian family takes parental leave without fear. The American family takes leave at the risk of poverty.
The American is not free. The American is one paycheck from disaster. The American is in servitude to employers and debt. The Norwegian has freedom from financial ruin.
The difference is not ideology. It is who carries the risk.
In Norway, the risk of pregnancy is socialized. The employer cannot fire a pregnant worker. The state covers parental leave. The cost is spread across the entire population.
In the United States, the risk is privatized. The employer is a shareholder. The employee is a cost center. Pregnancy is a liability. Childbirth is a financial crisis. The employer shifts the burden onto the worker. The worker absorbs the cost of reproducing the species.
The United States treats children as a financial burden. Norway treats children as future workers. The Norwegian state invests in children because children become taxpayers. The American state treats children as a private choice with private consequences.
The result is demographic collapse.
The US birth rate is cratering. People cannot afford to have children. The cost of childcare exceeds housing in many cities. The cost of healthcare exceeds a car. The cost of education exceeds a home. The American dream has become a calculation: Can I afford to reproduce?
The answer is increasingly no.
Norway does not have this problem. The birth rate is stable because the cost of children is manageable. The state makes it possible for families to exist. The United States makes it impossible for families to survive.
This is not about values. The conservative will say Norway is a small, homogeneous country with a different culture. The conservative is wrong. Norway has a conservative party. Norway has rural populations. Norway has the same tensions that exist everywhere. The difference is that Norway decided to socialize the cost of dignity. The United States decided to privatize it.
The difference is a choice.
The United States chooses to spend $800 billion a year on the military. Norway chooses to spend that money on children.
The United States chooses to subsidize oil companies and pharmaceutical corporations. Norway chooses to subsidize daycare and healthcare.
The United States chooses to tax labor at higher rates than capital. Norway taxes wealth and income to fund public services.
These are not inevitable outcomes. They are policy decisions. They reflect what the government values.
The American argument against social programs is that they are too expensive. The data shows the opposite. The American pays more for less. The Norwegian pays less for more. The private market is not efficient. It is a mechanism for extracting profit from necessity.
The argument is not about money. It is about who controls the money.
The American system extracts wealth from workers and transfers it to shareholders. The Norwegian system pools risk and shares resources. The American goes bankrupt from a medical emergency. The Norwegian never sees the bill. The American skips a paycheck and loses housing. The Norwegian has a safety net.
The difference is dignity.
The Norwegian worker is treated as a human being whose life has value beyond labor. The American worker is treated as a cost center. When the American worker gets sick, the system asks how much it will cost to fix them. When the Norwegian worker gets sick, the system asks what they need to recover.
The price is not just financial. It is psychological. The American lives with constant dread. The knowledge that one mistake, one illness, one layoff, one pregnancy could destroy everything. The Norwegian lives without that dread. The floor is solid.
The conservative will say high taxes are theft. The data says high taxes are a purchase. The Norwegian purchases security. The American purchases the illusion of freedom while living in precarity.
The real theft is what the American system extracts. Time. Health. The possibility of having a family. The ability to take a risk, quit a bad job, have a child, get sick, grow old. The ability to live.
Norway is not a utopia. It has problems. It has tensions. It has conservatives who argue for lower taxes. But even its conservatives accept the basic premise that healthcare and childcare are public goods. Even they agree that children should not be a financial catastrophe.
The United States has no such consensus. The governing philosophy is that survival is a private matter. If you cannot afford healthcare, that is your problem. If you cannot afford daycare, you should not have had children. If you cannot take parental leave, you should have planned better.
The philosophy is not freedom. It is cruelty dressed as economics.
The numbers do not lie. The Norwegian pays higher taxes and gets more. The American pays lower taxes and gets less. The Norwegian has healthcare, childcare, education, and paid leave. The American has debt, precarity, and the knowledge that one wrong step could end everything.
The choice is not between high taxes and low taxes. The choice is between paying once and paying twice. Between investing in citizens and extracting from them. Between treating children as the future and treating them as a luxury.
The United States has made its choice.
The result is a birth rate that is collapsing, a maternal mortality rate that is rising, and a population that cannot afford to reproduce.
Norway has made its choice.
The result is a population that can afford children, a healthcare system that works, and a society that does not bankrupt its citizens for the crime of getting sick.
The difference is not culture.
The difference is not values.
The difference is money.
Specifically, where it goes.
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Norway has a $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund from offshore oil or around $400,000 per person.
“The United States has made its choice.
The result is a birth rate that is collapsing”
But at 1.62 it’s higher than Norway’s 1.42.
Seems like good news in both countries.
Didn’t Matt just note that “you might be a conservative, if you believe in endless growth”? (Trying to word that as Jeff Foxworthy might.)
“The American has debt”
Norway has one of the highest household debt-to-income ratios in the world.
MS, you’ve constructed a neat little morality play where Norway is the enlightened parent and the United States is the drunken uncle, but the whole thing rests on a stack of selective comparisons and numbers dropped without context — as if repetition equals proof. But repetition is just a way to get people to believe what you say by saying it twice, because that’s how the mind works. But repetition is just a way to get people to believe what you say by saying it twice, because that’s how the mind works. You glide from daycare costs to military spending as though budgets are fungible in the way slogans are. You treat a small petrostate with a sovereign wealth fund as a plug-and-play model for any world economy, and quietly ignore tradeoffs, constraints, and the very real fact that systems produce different outcomes for different reasons beyond “who gets the money.” And ignore that opportunists position themselves to extract wealth from socialist and capitalist systems alike. This reads like a script where the answer was written first and the support info was cast afterward to play supporting roles. Another repetition tactic found here most every day.
I think I would agree with you about the necessity of higher taxes, but almost everything you’ve said here is incorrect.
You imply that the United States doesn’t spend any money on healthcare and the welfare of its citizens, instead spending most of the budget on defense. However, this is not true at all. In 2024, the United States spent $1.5 trillion on Social Security, $865 billion on Medicare, $618 billion on Medicaid, $370 billion on Income Security Programs, and $752 billion on various benefit programs. In 2024, the United States spent $850 billion on defense. $850 billion is a lot of money, but is tiny compared to the trillions of dollars that the United States spends on healthcare and welfare. Even if you axed the armed forces and spent zero dollars on defense, the United States would still have a spending deficit due to how much this country spends on healthcare and welfare.
Furthermore, as has already been pointed, your argument about US birth rates is nonsensical. The United States not only has a higher birth rate than Norway, but also Denmark, Sweden, and all other Nordic countries. Additionally, the United States has a higher birth rate than the European Union, China, and most other developed nations.
Nevertheless, I would probably agree that the United States has bad healthcare system. Despite all the money we spend, it doesn’t seem to yield a system that works for everyone. I could probably be convinced we should pay higher taxes. However, your argument is not a good one. At best you’re stretching the truth to reach some predetermined conclusion, and at worse you’re outright lying.