Episode 168 · 2023-01-02 · 42:32 · Original in Finnish
Cut Nine Billion of Waste | Lassi Kivinen | Negotiator 168
Originally published as “Leikataan 9 miljardia turhaa! | Lassi Kivinen | Neuvottelija 168”
Lassi Kivinen, chair of Finland's Liberal Party, presents a nine-billion-euro list of spending cuts and justifies it by sorting the budget into public goods and private ones. Defence, the police and the courts are left alone; business subsidies, culture funding, the public broadcaster Yle and the gambling-monopoly grant system go under the magnifying glass. The conversation runs from what he calls structural corruption to the incentive flaw in the wellbeing services counties' funding model, and on to why a transfer payment appears to be Finland's answer to every problem. Kivinen also argues that employing people and selling below market price are not the state's job.
Core theses
- The public-good test, not the size of the line item, decides what can be cut — which is why defence and the courts survive a nine-billion list.
- Subsidy systems create the constituencies that defend them; Kivinen's term for the resulting equilibrium is structural corruption.
- The wellbeing services counties' funding model rewards spending rather than outcomes, so its incentive flaw is a design question, not a budgeting one.
- Reaching for a transfer payment as the default answer converts every policy problem into a permanent expenditure.
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Summary
Lassi Kivinen, chair of Finland’s Liberal Party, presents a nine-billion-euro list of spending cuts and justifies it by sorting the budget into public goods and private ones. Defence, the police and the courts are left alone; business subsidies, culture funding, the public broadcaster Yle and the gambling-monopoly grant system go under the magnifying glass. The conversation runs from what he calls structural corruption to the incentive flaw in the wellbeing services counties’ funding model, and on to why a transfer payment appears to be Finland’s answer to every problem. Kivinen also argues that employing people and selling below market price are not the state’s job.
Sorting before cutting
The list is not an austerity exercise looking for round numbers. Kivinen’s method is to ask, line by line, whether the state is buying a public good — something that will not be produced at all without it — or a private one. That is why defence, the police and the courts come through untouched while business subsidies do not.
Structural corruption
His term for the pattern where a subsidy creates an organised beneficiary that then defends it. The point is not that anyone is acting corruptly; it is that the system reliably produces the constituency that makes the spending permanent.
The incentive in the counties’ funding model
The narrowest and most technical item in the episode, and the one with the longest tail: a funding formula that responds to spending rather than to outcomes tells the wellbeing services counties what to maximise, and they will.
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Leikataan 9 miljardia turhaa! | Lassi Kivinen | Neuvottelija 168. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.
In depth
The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode: English · suomeksi.
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People and topics
Guests: Lassi Kivinen
Topics: Finnish Economy & Policy