In the current issue of The Spectator I interview Sweden’s Anders Borg, perhaps the most successful conservative finance minister in the world — both in his economic track record, and the accompanying electoral success. His response to the crash was a permanent tax cut to speed the recovery. At the time, everyone told him it was madness. But Borg is unusual amongst finance ministers, in that he is a trained economist. To him, madness lay in repeating the formula of the 1970s and expecting different results. Last year, Sweden celebrated the elimination of its deficit. It’s perhaps worth mentioning a few other points which I didn’t fit into the interview.
1. Revenge of the nerds. Borg and Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish Prime Minister, have no interest in being interesting. Reinfeldt is incredibly dull, and Borg is a numbers man. In opposition, Borg was famed throughout the party for his ‘macro emails’ — dense arguments for tax cuts, studded with graphs and complicated maths, which filled some 30 pages when printed.
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