Something rare happened this week that almost no one seems to have noticed.
The world's leading economists broadly agree.
That almost never happens in that field - you can normally find two Nobel laureates who disagree about whether water flows downhill. But in this case they stand shoulder to shoulder -
Differentiated VAT reduction on food is a bad idea.
Expensive, messy, skewed.
And as if to remove the last trace of doubt, the International Monetary Fund now chimes in and directly advises the Danish government not to do it.
But nothing helps.
The government continues undeterred, and the conservative bloc watches helplessly - like men who show up to a duel and discover their pistols are only loaded with facts and arguments.
Because there's something you need to understand about Danish politics if you want to understand anything at all -
Proposals don't fall on their content!
They fall on their sender!
And economists are the wrong sender. They have models, data and experience from forty countries, and it has never moved a single vote. The National Bank has tried before. The Economic Council has tried for fifty years. The Finance Ministry's own number crunchers have tried, right up until they were asked to calculate again, with a calculator that had been retrained in the fact that the answer is both a social construction and a power relation.
So we need to bring out the really big battery.
Is there anyone who can get Palestine to speak out against the idea?
It doesn't need to be much - a spokesman, a press release, just a single post on X. Or Ukraine. One sentence from Zelenskyy about how differentiated VAT weakens European cohesion.
Then the proposal falls before the weekend. Maybe as early as Thursday, if someone manages to sew a banner.
It's not that we don't listen to the world here in this country. It's just that we only listen to the parts of it that haven't done the maths.
🤓🤷♂️
It reminds me that we should perhaps start a collection and see if we can scrape together enough for a calculator for each member of the Red-Green Alliance for Christmas.
Can you imagine what a difference it would make for the little kingdom if they learned to use one like that? 😎😁
