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Notes -
That data. If you look at the data from 2007 to 2019 (excluding the covid period, including both the Great Recession but also the recovery period) the US grew steadily from about $48,000 to $65,000, while Denmark and Sweden had stagnation. Norway, as noted earlier, is a special case of good governance + massive per capita natural resources, but it also didn't see a net increase in this period. It's true that they were doing well relative to the US prior to 2007, but my original steelman was that social democracy creates a structural tendency to stagnation as the population ages.
The technological catch up is something I haven't heard and that I think is interesting, but it's beyond the scope of my steelmanning right-wing utilitarianism, since it's not a strongly established position, and my point is that social democracy isn't obviously preferable if you're a utilitarian.
A lot depends on the details, e.g. I suspect that a lot people high in Big Five conscientiousness would be happier with employed poverty than (somewhat) less poor unemployment. There is a huge amount of literature showing the negative aveerage effects of poverty on subjective happiness (as well as plenty of folk psychology) but the same is also true of unemployment, especially long-term unemployment. Also, the margin of difference between Swedish vs. US unemployment and Swedish vs. US poverty (going on that graph) seems to be bigger in the case of the former, e.g. US unemployment is about 4 percentage points lower than that of Sweden right now, whereas the difference in poverty (using the measure you provided) is about 1 percentage point. The unemployment gap may be bigger than normal right now, but Sweden seems to have a trend unemployment rate of about 8% at best and the US a trend of about 5% at worst. So, even if the harm from poverty is greater, the difference in unemployment is bigger.
On the other hand, you could argue that the graph you give just captures one part of a bigger picture, since e.g. $2.5 a day is hardly luxurious and US poverty may be bigger. Also, poor relief may be more generous in Scandinavia (plausible). A more complex argument could refute my claims. But that's my point! When one takes into account all the differences, the utilitarian cases for right-wing or left-wing policies both need to be complex - they aren't obvious either way.
Yes, I think that an epistemically modest utilitarian is still trying to optimise, but what they can plausibly do within their epistemic limitations, which is to find good long-run moral and political rules. Even then, there is an important difference from deontology, in that in extreme cases it may be obvious that departing from the rules will result in better long-run aggregate utility. This is one of the more plausible parts of utilitarianism, I think: you have to be hardcore into rights to be willing to permit massive suffering instead of e.g. making a tiny infraction of someone's rights. The plausibility of consequentialism (with utilitarianism as one variant) in extreme circumstances was part of a debate on human rights a while back in the UK parliament, which I thought was interesting:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VO2Ry4j79LU&t=221s
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