Anu Partanen > Quotes

“What if the entire purpose of the state in the twenty-first century, as agreed upon and expressly stated by its citizens, was not to take more power away from the people, but just the opposite: to push the modern values of freedom and independence even further, to provide the people with the logistical foundation for the most comprehensive form of individual liberty possible?”
― Anu Partanen

“Americans “are stuck in a society that ensures none of the fundamental opportunities that people need to achieve even basic middle-class comforts. This condemns Americans to an anxiety-ridden battle where a person had better be special, because the alternative is not succeeding at all.”
― Anu Partanen

“For in the United States more than half of fast-food workers rely on some form of public assistance to get by, meaning that American taxpayers are actually subsidizing the fast-food industry...”
― Anu Partanen

“At some point americans forgot that it's not enough to talk about equal opportunity, democracy and freedom. These things need to be protected and supported by concrete actions. Something that americans of recent decades have neglected to do. The implications of this are profound. In more cases than not, the guilt and frustration that americans feel about their difficulties in life and their anxieties almost certainly do not arise from any personal failings. The United States today puts the people, even people who are doing well into intensly stressful logistical nightmare that is exhausting. Why do americans have to put themselves through this when there are other ways of life proved and in place already functioning well for the combined 26 million people of the Nordic region?”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“In a study Suzanne Mettler asked 1,400 Americans whether they had used a government social program. Fifty-seven percent said they had not. Then she asked if they had used one of twenty-one specific federal policies, including child-care tax credits, the Earned Income Tax Credit, employer-sponsored and thus tax exempted health insurance, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, mortgage-interest deductions, and student loans. It turned out that 96 percent of those who had denied using government programs had in fact used at least one, and the average responder had used four. This clear disconnect between Americans' perception of who benefits from government programs and the reality makes it easier to keep demonizing the "welfare state.”
― Anu Partanen

“Americans have perfected the questionable art of what Suzann Mettler, a professor at Cornell University calls "the submerged state." -- making government policies invisible by administering them through private companies, or through the tax code, instead of just sending recipients checks. In reality tax deductions, credits and exemptions are government support for specific groups of people, in the form of tax dollars not collected, just as cash benefits are. However, many people don't perceive or acknowledge that reality, and wrongly assume that they're not benefiting from the government at all, even when they are.”
― Anu Partanen