Satire · first published 2022-11-11
The midterms, envy day and the Sámi Parliament Act | Weekly Wiseguys, 11 November 2022
Sami Miettinen and the journalist Matti Virtanen on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 11 November 2022. The single best observation is about expertise: two Finnish specialists on the United States gave diametrically opposite forecasts on the same question, and the panel's explanation is that an expert's liking for a foreign politician colours their prediction of his success. On the day Finland publishes everyone's tax records, Norway's model is put forward as a concrete alternative. At the end Matti Virtanen explains the background to the Sámi Parliament Act dispute — who counts as an Inari Sámi, where the reindeer-herding families came from, and why the argument is also about livelihoods — and the panel falls out over whether small wealth differences mean poverty or a functioning welfare state.
The midterms, envy day and the Sámi Parliament Act | Weekly Wiseguys, 11 November 2022
Summary: Sami Miettinen and the journalist Matti Virtanen on Ivan Puopolo’s Weekly Wiseguys, 11 November 2022. The single best observation is about expertise: two Finnish specialists on the United States gave diametrically opposite forecasts on the same question, and the panel’s explanation is that an expert’s liking for a foreign politician colours their prediction of his success. On the day Finland publishes everyone’s tax records, Norway’s model is put forward as a concrete alternative. At the end Matti Virtanen explains the background to the Sámi Parliament Act dispute — who counts as an Inari Sámi, where the reindeer-herding families came from, and why the argument is also about livelihoods — and the panel falls out over whether small wealth differences mean poverty or a functioning welfare state.
This is a summary on Neuvottelija AI. The episode itself is on Ivan Puopolo’s channel and is his — watch the original. The appearance is catalogued at neuvottelija.com/media, which is the canonical home of this content.
A note on reading this. Weekly Wiseguys is a tongue-in-cheek political panel, not a news broadcast. The speakers are right-of-centre commentators and politicians talking in their own names, sharpening for effect and joking as they go. This article sorts their arguments and marks who said what; it takes no position on who is right, and it does not reproduce the personal jabs. Speakers are named only where the recording itself identifies who is talking: the transcript carries no speaker labels, so uncertain passages are attributed to the panel or to “one of the guests” rather than to a name. The opinions are the speakers’ own.
The panel
Ivan Puopolo hosting, with Sami Miettinen and the journalist Matti Virtanen. Recorded on 11 November 2022, three days after the US midterms and in the same week Finland published everyone’s tax records. A studio dog, Bea, is introduced as the fourth wiseguy and later gets tangled in the cables.
Expertise that leans the way the expert wants
The most generalisable observation in the episode is not about the United States but about expert commentary, and it comes from a concrete case.
Puopolo says he interviewed two Finnish specialists on the United States about the same question: would Donald Trump win the Republican primary if he ran. The answers were opposite. One said he would win without question; the other that he certainly would not. Same question, same evidence, opposite ends of the range.
The panel’s explanation is structural, and offered as a hypothesis:
When an expert specialises in a country, his assessment of a politician’s chances of success there is coloured by what he thinks of that politician. Wishes leak into the forecast.
Germany is their example: if you rate the chancellor, you more readily judge that the coalition will hold; if you do not, you judge that the country is heading for trouble. The observation is checkable by anyone after the fact, and it applies equally to them — which the panel says out loud in a later episode.
The midterms: what was settled and what was not
The analysis is more measured than the programme’s reputation would suggest.
The starting point is that an incumbent president almost always loses the midterms, Biden was unpopular and the economy weak — an unusually favourable set-up for Republicans. So a result in which the House went Republican by a narrow margin and the Senate stayed open is read here as a Democratic damage-limitation win.
Two explanations are offered:
- Abortion. The Supreme Court decision was recent, and it raised turnout particularly among young women. The panel’s additional observation is sharp: wherever people could vote directly on abortion rights, they did — and at the same time Republicans lost their own motivating question, because the card had already been played.
- Candidate selection. Trump-endorsed candidates underperformed relative to the field, because many of them had built a profile on disputing the previous election result.
The caveat the panel puts to Democrats is equally direct: the result did not change the composition of the Supreme Court, and a ruling on affirmative action in university admissions was coming next. That prompts a note about applicants of Asian background, who have in practice been required to perform markedly better in entrance testing — and about the American racial classification of the whole population, which the episode regards as strange in itself.
A press that adopts one of the narratives
Puopolo’s observation about Finnish coverage is precise and should be read as a claim the reader can check.
The campaign contained two mirror-image threats: on the Democratic account a Republican win destroys democracy, on the Republican account a Democratic win destroys the economy and public safety. His claim is that Finnish coverage repeated the first as given and flagged the second as a narrative in need of correction.
The explanation he offers is cultural: by American standards Finnish public discourse sits on the left, so Democratic framings feel natural and pass through unexamined.
And from this follows the most honest proposal in the episode, one that applies to them too: instead of claiming objectivity, a columnist should state his own political position and let the reader account for it. “I could put at the top of every column that, fine, I am a right-liberal.”
Politics and truth
A short but well-put section that does not take a side.
The claim: politics has a degree of dishonesty built in, because a perfectly honest politician loses to one who is not. The counter, which the panel reports hearing from politicians themselves: strategy and ideology hold while tactics change — so the consistency is where it was promised.
The qualification that makes the passage usable: politicians usually do not lie outright. The skill is speaking a shaded truth without an outright falsehood, and being caught in a direct lie still ends a career. The line between the two is fine rather than sharp, and the panel concedes as much.
As an aside they say parties keep a ledger of each other’s old untruths and raise them in retaliation at convenient moments. That is the panel’s interpretation, not a documented finding.
Envy day, and the Norwegian model
On the day Finland publishes everyone’s tax records, the episode offers a concrete alternative rather than simply criticising the status quo — and that is its most valuable contribution.
The Norwegian model: the data is available, but a requester must log in and give a name, and the subject can see who has looked at his records. The panel’s claim is that this ended neighbour-watching almost entirely. The claim is checkable.
Three separate problems are identified with the Finnish arrangement:
- The opt-out list is itself public. That someone asked to be removed becomes a story in its own right — and the press obtains the figures by other routes anyway.
- Publicity is not bounded by purpose. The panel concedes outright that there is a clear public interest in the income and taxes of a politician where corruption is suspected. There is no such interest in an entertainer’s income. That distinction is drawn rather than skipped.
- An error cannot be corrected. The episode discusses a case in which a person entered a figure of 133 million euros into his own records, which passed through and was reported as real. On the panel’s account the figure cannot be corrected afterwards under current law.
On what the list leaves out, the panel makes one solid point: it shows tax paid on earned and capital income but not consumption taxes — VAT, excise, tobacco and alcohol duty. Counted in, the league table of top taxpayers would look different.
Two readings of the same wealth figures
This is the episode’s clearest disagreement, and it is worth reading in full.
Miettinen gives the figures: wealth per adult in Western countries is over a hundred thousand euros higher than in Finland, and in the Nordics over two hundred thousand higher — while the richest one per cent owns about 13 per cent of wealth in Finland, around 30 in Sweden and around 40 in the United States. His conclusion: “extremely poor, extremely equal.”
Virtanen disputes the conclusion, not the figures: “you are simply framing the welfare state negatively. Extremely poor means a functioning welfare state.”
Miettinen’s answer moves the question to buffers: when a shock like an inflation crisis arrives, households have no wealth to absorb it, and the bill lands on the state. Neither moves to the other’s position, and the episode leaves the dispute open.
Imputed rent
The sharp end of the tax discussion is a proposal the panel opposes, and which it notes is widely supported among economists — a fair way to present it.
The mechanism: an owner-occupier derives a notional benefit from living in his own home, and that benefit is untaxed. The proposal would value it at the equivalent rent and tax it as capital income.
The panel’s objections:
- Property tax and land tax are already paid. The other side’s position is that these are cost-type charges rather than taxation of income — the panel reports that counter-argument itself.
- A structural objection. If holding an asset attracts a continuing charge, ownership becomes a right of use. The panel sharpens this into rhetoric rather than analysis at this point, and it should be read that way.
Miettinen adds a related tip which he himself marks as legally not investment advice: owner-occupied housing is the only tax-free income class after two years of residence, so moving and letting out the previous home produces rental cash flow plus an appreciation that accrued tax-free. He also states the risk himself: property values can fall, and pipe renovations arrive.
Universally binding agreements — and a correction from inside the panel
A good example of the episode correcting its own claims.
The claim: Finland has no mechanism for removing a bad law, because there is no constitutional court. The image used is a fish trap — bureaucracy goes in, nothing comes out.
The correction, in the same conversation: the mechanism exists. A Finnish court may not apply a statute that is in manifest conflict with the constitution. The panel concludes that if a dispute over universally binding collective agreements reached a court, the court could in principle decline to apply the provision. The claim that such agreements violate freedom of contract remains an opinion.
In the same passage the panel criticises its own political neighbourhood — the National Coalition Party — for wanting to fund the public sector differently rather than shrink it. The phrase “Finland’s most right-wing left-wing party” is a sharpening, but the observation behind it is checkable: cuts are discussed in the conditional.
Economists are also given credit: the phased removal of mortgage interest deductibility was their recommendation and it happened.
The Sámi Parliament Act: the section where the expert explains
The last third is the best part of the episode, because one guest plainly knows more about the subject than the others and is allowed to explain. The host marks this himself by asking “is that how it goes, Matti?”
Virtanen’s account of the dispute:
- The status quo. The Sámi Parliament’s executive decides the electoral roll, but its decisions are subject to the administrative courts. Over decades the Supreme Administrative Court has restored voting rights to a substantial share of those the Parliament had removed.
- The core of the dispute. This has brought Inari Sámi and forest Sámi onto the Parliament, whom some of those grounded in reindeer herding and North Sámi regard as not genuine.
- The history. The original range of the North Sámi reindeer families was in Norway. They moved to the Finnish side during the 1800s, and administrative border decisions left them and their herds in Finland without access to the Arctic Ocean pastures. The herds then spread into Inari Sámi territory.
- Livelihood. The traditional Inari Sámi livelihoods are fishing, hunting and forestry — not intensive reindeer herding. The dispute is therefore also a dispute about livelihoods.
- Language. The Inari Sámi had more contact with Finns and partly lost their language, which has since been revived with public funding.
The political positions are given from both sides: the Centre Party’s argument is that the law protects one minority in a way that leaves another unprotected — “a minority within a minority” — and that this group was not consulted. The government’s justification is international: the EU, the UN and the ILO have criticised a state defining membership of an indigenous people.
The panel also offers a logical observation they regard as a contradiction: gender law is moving toward self-identification while here membership is defined through descent. The observation is interesting, but it equates two different things — an individual’s legal status and an indigenous people’s self-government — and a reader should keep that in mind.
On the episode’s rhetoric. The segment is titled with words invoking skull measurement and racial doctrine. That is the programme’s own sharpening; this article does not reproduce it, because the substance of the dispute — who decides membership, and on what basis — can be set out without it.
Claims presented as claims
- The two experts’ forecasts. The host’s own account of his own interviews.
- The wealth comparison figures. Orders of magnitude, quoted from memory.
- The claim that the Norwegian model ended neighbour-watching. Offered without a source.
- The details of the 133-million case and its irreversibility. Second-hand.
- The claim that parties keep ledgers of each other’s lies. An interpretation.
- Readings of individual politicians’ motives. Inferences about intent, not observations.
What survives
The expertise observation. Two opposite forecasts from the same question is a concrete reminder that a foreign-policy expert’s assessment often contains an assessment of what he hopes. It is a usable reading instruction on any subject.
The Norwegian model. Debates about publishing tax records rarely present an option that is neither full disclosure nor full secrecy. Here one is presented.
The disagreement about wealth. The same figures, two opposite conclusions, and neither declared the winner. It is the most honest moment in the episode.
How the episode runs
- 00:00 — Opening, and the agenda
- 00:49 — The US midterms: what was actually on the ballot
- 01:38 — “Won but lost” — why there was no red wave
- 02:26 — Trump-endorsed candidates and election denial
- 03:14 — Abortion as the driver of turnout
- 04:47 — Two narratives: democracy in peril versus the economy and anarchy
- 05:42 — Why the Finnish press adopted one of them
- 06:36 — A proposal: a columnist should disclose his own position
- 07:30 — What was actually settled and what was not
- 08:27 — Affirmative action and applicants of Asian background
- 09:14 — The American racial classification as a system of its own
- 10:17 — Trump versus DeSantis
- 10:45 — Two experts, two opposite forecasts
- 11:59 — Why an expert’s preference colours the forecast
- 12:45 — Politics and truth: the tactical truth
- 14:25 — Where the line runs between a lie and a shaded truth
- 15:11 — The parties’ ledger of each other’s lies
- 16:43 — Why one of them would not go into politics
- 17:33 — The threshold for a career-ending revelation has fallen
- 19:13 — Forgiveness in Finland and in the United States
- 20:00 — Envy day: the Norwegian model and neighbour-watching
- 21:48 — The opt-out list, GDPR and journalistic interest
- 23:23 — What the tax list actually tells you
- 24:11 — A 133-million prank that cannot be corrected
- 25:52 — Who is on the list, and why it changes every year
- 27:24 — What the list leaves out: consumption taxes
- 28:16 — Tracking consumption, and the exit tax
- 29:58 — Owner-occupied housing as the only tax-free income class
- 30:44 — An investment tip that is not an investment tip
- 31:30 — Imputed rent, and why the panel opposes taxing it
- 35:32 — Income gaps, wealth gaps, and two readings of the same figures
- 37:04 — The disagreement: poor and equal, or a working welfare state
- 38:42 — Twitter, Musk and eight dollars
- 41:12 — Tax transparency in Russia and in the United States
- 43:35 — Green politics as an instrument, and a party called the most right-wing left party
- 46:00 — Universally binding agreements, a fish trap, and section 106
- 49:22 — The economists whose recommendation did get through
- 50:12 — The Sámi Parliament Act: where the dispute comes from
- 52:37 — Why the dispute is also about livelihoods
- 54:09 — The Inari Sámi and the North Sámi reindeer families
- 56:43 — The minority within a minority, and the logic of collectives
- 59:02 — Self-government, transfers and identity
- 01:01:30 — The week’s good news