Kinda, sorta. The public tax returns we have in Norway do not say:
- Where the income comes from (could be many sources)
- Whether or not there were any serious deductions
At the very best, you'll get a figure with lots of variance.
Say you sell a house / apartment, and made $xxk on that one. That one will get lumped in with your regular income. Same if you sell some stock / equity.
Most people don't go around perusing other people's tax returns even if they are public though. I'm not sure if most people even realise that they can just go and ask the tax authorities on what their boss makes.
Helps with salary gaps within those countries, but salaries are still laughable compared to US software engineering salaries. Does anyone know why that is?
Demand: US has much more investment in pure-tech. In EU a lot of SWE are working in IT offices of non-tech companies. So the job market in the US is more competitive.
Supply: In the EU university is easily accessible, meaning that there are thousands of universities pumping hundreds of thousands of graduates a year. Plus, now they even invented the Blue Card to make it easy for skilled second/third worlders to immigrate to the EU.
Listen to the MBAs and they'll tell you there's a shortage of developers everywhere. What they really mean is that there's a shortage of devs willing to work for what they're willing to pay.
Same in Finland, just not in the Internet (except for the highest earners' tax returns), you can call by phone or physically visit the tax office to get anyone's tax return
Sweden & Denmark favour high taxes and social responsibility; I'm sure you are aware but in socialist countries, healthcare, education and economic support are all provided free to every citizen, regardless of how much they earn.
Sweden & Denmark absolutely live that vision.
People get confused because they've conflated socialism and communism, where communism is a means of controlling and distributing the means of production across the people; an economic model that differs from socialism which puts the needs of the people in control of the state; but allows innovation outside of that.
Some people also get confused because they believe that anything involving a private market means Capitalism; that's not true, capitalism is a specific system where, by definition, the wealth has similar rights to the labour in how it gets paid. Some people think this is why capitalism is innovative, because it incentivises "old money" capital to invest, but it favours rewarding people who already have money, which is at odds with the Swedish model.
I think you're right that Denmark is not materially less socialist, in fact you could argue that Sweden is the less socialist one as they've been selling off their healthcare systems to private healthcare for a while now.. Which has resulted in a pretty bad healthcare system honestly.
Most countries in Europe provide that don’t they? Also, Sweden has the number 8 highest income tax in Europe and has in fact very low taxes on investments (the ISK accounts).
“Pretty bad healthcare system honestly”? That’s a big exaggeration… both public and private healthcare has worked great in my experience. Sounds like you have some kind of beef with Scandinavia.
1) Most countries in Europe provide [healthcare, education and economic support]
Varies state to state, in some countries there is "mandatory health insurance" which is subsidised, NHS is free at point of sale in the UK.
Education is also dubious, as in some of Europe there's subsidies for childcare under school age, but it's nearly universal to have free healthcare for standard ages (school years 0 - 11); and very few countries offer higher education (university) for free (and even fewer pay you) -- Sweden/Denmark do all of that.
When it comes to income support, if you lose your job then you're really taken care of, it's not really as binary as "do they offer support", in Sweden you can have 80% of your pay for the first year in most cases, only 20% of that is paid by your employer; which is a bit unprecedented in Europe.
2) Sweden has the number 8 highest income tax
Such things are not so easy to quantify, Sweden has 2 tax rates;
a) Municipal tax rate, (usually around 32%~)
b) Federal tax rate (20%)
Municipal tax applies to everything you earn, Federal tax only applies to everything after 45,000 SEK (4.500 EUR/mo); that's for income tax, there's also social contribution tax that your employer pays (19-30% depending on how they operate in the country) and the highest VAT in Europe.
You'd have to try to understand how that applies for you. My salary is higher than average but not absurdly high and I'd earn more money in my pocket in every single other country in Europe, I think that's because there's an "absurdly high earner" tax in most countries and a lot of those comparisons take "maximum effective tax" as their only reporting metric, UK has 4 tax bands for example, one of which only kicks in at 150.000gbp p/a; which is 4x the national average and the tax rate then is still lower than Swedens.
So it being "8th highest" is dubious. I'd be interested to see the citation; though I would agree that websites are not doing a real analysis about what they're saying and just stating an "effective top tax"
3) Private healthcare works for me
Private healthcare through my insurance is actually great, but nothing is better than a fully working properly socialised healthcare service; they have tremendous buying power, even operate their own supply chains and can provide services which don't just bring them profit.
My childhood in the UK without the NHS would have been positively miserable, it's hard to imagine how it was because of what it has become now though.
"if you lose your job then you're really taken care of" only if you've paid into insurance: to get taken care of you need to pay into both an a-kassa and an inkomstförsäkring. Ie, two insurances. The money you get from the government is usually capped, and capped low (considering all salaries in Sweden).
Also, remember the ISK accounts. By paying 0.375% on your account assets annually, you don't pay any capital gains tax. This is imo a big enabler for the "common person" to build up capital.
Your source (tax foundation) is incorrect in the way I mentioned, it takes "top personal income tax" as its only metric without consideration about where that tax rate begins to be applied.
It's also completely wrong about Denmark, where the top tax rate is actually capped at 52.07%
> Altogether, the marginal tax rate cannot exceed 52.07%
> People get confused because they've conflated socialism and communism, where communism is a means of controlling and distributing the means of production across the people; an economic model that differs from socialism which puts the needs of the people in control of the state; but allows innovation outside of that.
This is incorrect. Socialism is workers owning the means of production. Communism is a post-capitalist classless stateless society. When people say socialist in terms of the Nordic countries, it is more about social democracy than workers owning the means of production.
The problem with our understanding of the term is that it's used by people who mean socialism to be communism, and have conflated them. (perhaps unintentionally).
Even in Marxist theory, which is the point of reference to communism, Karl Marx States: ‘socialism is the first stage of the worldwide transition to communism’
Ergo it is not communism in of itself.
I'll leave this little prose from the bottom of the dictionary definition for socialism:
> The term ‘socialism’ has been used to describe positions as far apart as anarchism, Soviet state Communism, and social democracy; however, it necessarily implies an opposition to the untrammelled workings of the economic market. The socialist parties that have arisen in most European countries from the late 19th century have generally tended towards social democracy
"True Communism" has always been the promise of heaven-on-earth without a God. It never happens, of course--any power vacuum is immediately filled by greedy people with no scruples. At least in a society with a God, there's something for the power-brokers to be afraid of.
Autocrats are pervasive and sometimes they feel inevitable, which is why it's nice when we are able to build social structures that are resistant to corruption.
Unfortunately even they are fallible.
But why did you say this in response to my comment?
Swedens and Norways top political parties have ‘social’ in their name. Also, I would say socialism is more of a sliding scale based on ‘how big’ the role of government is. It depends on what level of the ‘social programs’ fall under the perview of the government vs. private industry.
I would say Sweden and Denmark are more ‘socialist leaning’ compared to other democratic republics of the world.
