Denmark : Globalization and the Welfare State Essay

The United States is often referred to as a ‘reluctant welfare state.’ There are various reasons for this description. One of the primary reasons for this is the differences and diversity of the political parties which are the motivating forces that control government. The Liberal Party, for instance supports government safety nets and social service programs for those in need. “Liberals believe in government action to achieve equal opportunity and equality for all.” ("Studentnews," 2006) They believe it is the responsibility of government to ensure that the needs of all citizens are met, and to intervene to solve problems. The responsibility of government is to alleviate social ills, to protect civil liberties and sustain individual

The NHS came around in July 5, 1948. The Health Minister Aneurin (also known as Nye) Bevan purely nationalised the existing system across the UK. The groundbreaking change was to make all services freely available to everyone. Half of Scotland’s landmass was already covered by a state-funded health system serving the entire community and directly run from Edinburgh. Additionally, the war years had seen a state-funded hospital building programme in Scotland on a scale unknown in Europe. This was combined into the new NHS. Scotland also had its own individual medical tradition, this is centred on its medical schools rather than private practice. The legislation that empowered the UK to have the NHS is National Health Service Act (1948), this despite opposition from doctors, who maintained on the right to continue treating some patients privately. The NHS ensured that Doctors, hospital, dentists, opticians, ambulances, midwives and health visitors were available, free to everybody. This Reason why we have health services is because it developments a view that health care was a right, not something given unreliably by charity, also two-party’s agreement that the existing services were in a mess and had to be sorted out, it stopped financial difficulties for the voluntary hospitals and After the second world war it ensured the creation of an emergency medical service as part of the war effort

Economic view: Most of the Nordic countries have positive growth in GDP, which means the people have more disposable income – the amount of money that households have available for spending and saving after income taxes have been accounted for.

Since the end of the last ice age, Denmark has gone from a small hunter- gatherer society, to a super power during the Viking era, and slowly transformed into what it is today. Although not considered a super power in today’s standards it is still a thriving society, with citizens that are some of the happiest in the world. This is possible due in large part to their economy. The Danish military is small but completely capable of defending itself while simultaneously providing support to its allies. The physical environment of Denmark plays a significant part in what has made the country successful. All of these things combined truly make Denmark a model to live by.

In a more liberal and democratic country, the immigration issue is greater with ‘unwanted migrations’. For example,

The welfare system first came into action during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployed citizens needed federal assistance to escape the reality of severe poverty. The welfare system supplies families with services such as: food stamps, medicaid, and housing among others. The welfare system has played a vital role in the US, in controlling the amount of poverty to a certain level. Sadly, the system has been abused and taken for granted by citizens across the country. The welfare system was previously controlled by the federal government until 1996; the federal government handed over the responsibility to the states in hope of reducing welfare abuse. However, this change has not prevented folks from scamming the system. The

In America today, just over ten million people are on unemployment insurance, one hundred and ten million people are on welfare, and the total government spending annually is around one hundred and thirty billion dollars (Welfare Statistics). The welfare state is a political system based on the proposition that the government has the individual responsibility to ensure that the minimum standard of living is met for all citizens. Specifically, in the matters of health care, public education, employment, and social security, the welfare state assumes all responsibility. According to John Rawls, “In a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice“(Rawls). In the 1840s, Otto Von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, was the father of the modern welfare state. He built the program to win over the support of the working middle class in Germany and ultimately reduce the outflow of immigrants to the U.S., where welfare did not exist (Welfare State). In the United States, not all companies provided workers with benefits, thus the workers appealed to the government, giving rise to the first form of welfare capitalism.

The Danes welfare model gives them the ability to balance work with family life. Most are in good health. The language spoken is Danish. They enjoy their lifestyle and are known for their Danish traditions, Christian faith, architecture,

In the past, most immigrants came as workers with similar skill levels and from similar societies. Now, most immigrants come as relatives and from underdeveloped countries. As a result, most immigrants are poor, unskilled, and unable to mix into our society.

The idea behind the welfare state was to relieve poverty, reduce inequality, and achieve greater

A 2000 word comparative review of the ways different countries approach welfare, as discussed on the unit.

109,631,000, that is the number of Americans that lived in households that received benefits from one or more federally funded "means-tested programs" — also known as welfare — as of the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data released by the Census Bureau.( Jeffrey 1) This is my objective to tell the history and statistics of the welfare system in the U.S. There is no lack of information on the topic of welfare due to it being a topic of politics in the nation. Accordingly most information I have is from databases and news reports or speeches over it. However a lot of these areas of information can be biased which is something to avoid. To evenly space the information I will supply you with I am going to split it up into two halves. The first half will be the history of welfare and how it affects the country. The second half will be over the statistics and who all is eligible for welfare.

To measure societal acceptance towards immigrants, attitudinal data can be utilized to better understand the effects of immigration on both societies. One way to measure the general political reaction of each country towards the influx of immigrants. Though such data is constrained by temporal boundaries, a blanket understanding can be gleamed from surveys taken in nations during different periods. Further, in both countries, support for the importance of mainstream right-wing strategies has exacerbated the politicization of the immigrant issue. A survey asking identical questions in the two countries was conducted by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia in 2000. The Swedes tend to be more positive than the Danes, but the differences are not dramatic. However, similarly to Denmark, societal attention to the issue increased in the 1980s, not least due to a considerable growth in the number of refugees from the Middle East. In both nations, there are clear trends that reveal a significant rise in negative attitudes towards immigrants; but, the levels of said societal and political attention towards immigrants and the policies enacted which affect immigrants differ greatly in Sweden and Denmark.

The idea that globalization and the welfare states can conflict comes from the fact that: while globalization is based on profit maximization, the welfare states main goal is to reduce, if not eliminate inequality, insecurity and poverty through proper redistribution of wealth mechanisms. The welfare state has to enhance “people’s adaptability, so that they, whatever their skills, can turn themselves from losers into winners through their own efforts” (Dennis J. Snower. Et al.137). The point of departure is that these two concepts are related to the allocation of resources and any conflict will have to occur on that level. This paper will not analyze the responses of the welfare states to the challenges of the 1970 and 1980s but

The Labour Government as The Creator Of The Welfare State A Welfare State is a system in which the government undertakes responsibility for the well being of its population, through unemployment insurance, old age pensions and other social security measures. In order to achieve this the Labour Government of 1945-51 introduced a number of reforms, including the National Insurance Act of 1946 and the Education Act. They also managed to achieve full employment, a target never met before in Britain. However, they are not the only reason for the arrival of the Welfare State.