What you see a lot in discussions about welfare is that people are confused about the distinction between the financial sphere and the real sphere. This confusion is occasionally created maliciously, but certainly most of the time it happens out of sheer ignorance.
I don't think there is any doubt that Sweden has enough access to resources and manpower to care for 100% of the people. So in real terms, they can certainly afford it.
Add to that the fact that Sweden currently has an unemployment rate of about 8.1%. This indicates that there are in fact real resources (certainly manpower, but most likely more than that) available that could be used to care for everybody, without taking anything away from anybody else, simply by activating those real resources that are currently left unused.
(TANSTAAFL, but sometimes you should just eat everything that's on the table instead of throwing it out while some go hungry.)
However, in order to activate the real resources that are necessary to achieve that, money has to be set in motion, and a government deficit may be necessary - and people believe that this is not possible in the long term, hence "unaffordable".
But the Swedish government is monetarily sovereign. They are using their own currency, are not borrowing in foreign currencies (that I know of), and so can in principle spend whatever it likes. The only limit is the inflation that would be created if spending pushed past the limit of what is available in terms of real resources - but we've already established that plenty of real resources are currently available but unused.
I really liked your statement that making life good for 100% of the people is an incredibly hard problem. It's a great way to put it. I believe that it is hard mostly because of political opposition, and the political opposition in turn can only be so strong because people in general are not used to cleanly separate the financial sphere from the real sphere. Put simply, our understanding of economics is shamefully bad.
(Disclaimer: I am not an economist myself. The above is based on my understanding that I obtained from reading mostly blogs - and the occasional research article - from Modern Monetary Theory economists and those who challenge them; if you are interested, a good but lengthy starting point is this series: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/p/modern-monetary-theory-...)
The "financial sphere" and the "real sphere" are pretty closely related: the problem governments have is not so much borrowing constraints as how to effectively deploy the unused 8.1% of the labour resource without driving up prices for related economic resources that are pretty close to full capacity.
(rough analogy: not using CPU to it's fullest capacity doesn't necessarily mean you can make a program run any faster if you're I/O constrained)
"Modern Monetary Theory" economists have a lot of interesting ideas (I like economic iconoclasm myself and have formally studied the more conventional stuff) but are a bad starting point for learning about economics not least because they consistently (and deliberately in the case of the academics) misrepresent the positions of the academic economic mainstream.
Well. Sometimes they lend in foreign currency because they get a better rate that way. There have also been occasions when they have lent in other currencies because they have felt that the Crown is undervalued.
(Personally I favor MMR over MMT. They use mostly the same framework and ideas, but MMT seems to do quite a bit a hand waving when it comes inefficiences that arise due to the job guarantee they favor.)
I don't think there is any doubt that Sweden has enough access to resources and manpower to care for 100% of the people. So in real terms, they can certainly afford it.
Add to that the fact that Sweden currently has an unemployment rate of about 8.1%. This indicates that there are in fact real resources (certainly manpower, but most likely more than that) available that could be used to care for everybody, without taking anything away from anybody else, simply by activating those real resources that are currently left unused.
(TANSTAAFL, but sometimes you should just eat everything that's on the table instead of throwing it out while some go hungry.)
However, in order to activate the real resources that are necessary to achieve that, money has to be set in motion, and a government deficit may be necessary - and people believe that this is not possible in the long term, hence "unaffordable".
But the Swedish government is monetarily sovereign. They are using their own currency, are not borrowing in foreign currencies (that I know of), and so can in principle spend whatever it likes. The only limit is the inflation that would be created if spending pushed past the limit of what is available in terms of real resources - but we've already established that plenty of real resources are currently available but unused.
I really liked your statement that making life good for 100% of the people is an incredibly hard problem. It's a great way to put it. I believe that it is hard mostly because of political opposition, and the political opposition in turn can only be so strong because people in general are not used to cleanly separate the financial sphere from the real sphere. Put simply, our understanding of economics is shamefully bad.
(Disclaimer: I am not an economist myself. The above is based on my understanding that I obtained from reading mostly blogs - and the occasional research article - from Modern Monetary Theory economists and those who challenge them; if you are interested, a good but lengthy starting point is this series: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/p/modern-monetary-theory-...)