---
title: "Cut Nine Billion of Waste | Lassi Kivinen | Negotiator 168"
titleOriginal: "Leikataan 9 miljardia turhaa! | Lassi Kivinen | Neuvottelija 168"
episodeNumber: "168"
guest: "Lassi Kivinen"
datePublished: 2023-01-02
duration: "42:32"
youtube: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lyd94PaRmxo"
originalLanguage: "fi"
topics: ["finnish_economy_policy"]
subtitleMethod: "none"
provenance: "Owner page assembled from YouTube metadata and the neuvottelija.fi episode record. No chapter marks are published here: the publisher's list holds only two marks, at 0:00 and 0:51, and the second one's own text quotes a timestamp of 42:32 — it is a split of the show-note text rather than a chapter list, so republishing it would assert timestamps that do not hold. No transcript is published either — the channel has no English caption track for this episode and the Finnish one is YouTube's automatic track. The guest is the chair of a registered political party and the episode is his party's programme argued in his own words; no counter-position is represented in it, and the figures are those of the 2023 budget."
fiCanonical: "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/247-leikataan-9-miljardia-turhaa-lassi-kivinen-neuvottelija-168"
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep168-leikataan-9-miljardia-turhaa-lassi-kivinen/
---
# Cut Nine Billion of Waste | Lassi Kivinen | Negotiator 168

English subtitles are not available on this page. This is an episode summary, not a curated transcript.

## 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lyd94PaRmxo).
A Finnish edition of this episode is published at [www.neuvottelija.fi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/247-leikataan-9-miljardia-turhaa-lassi-kivinen-neuvottelija-168).

## In depth

The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode:
[English](https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/ep168-leikataan-9-miljardia-turhaa-lassi-kivinen/) · [suomeksi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/economy/ep168-leikataan-9-miljardia-turhaa-lassi-kivinen/).

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, Neuvottelija — Cut Nine Billion of Waste | Lassi Kivinen | Negotiator 168, https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep168-leikataan-9-miljardia-turhaa-lassi-kivinen/, 2023-01-02. For quotes include episode 168 and timestamp.