Sweden has some of the world's highest taxes, so why is the taxman so popular with the Swedes?

Sweden is infamous for having some of the highest taxes in the world, and yet the country’s tax agency is still one of Sweden’s most trusted institutions.

The Swedish attitude towards tax contrasts sharply with many countries where taxes can be a deeply divisive issue. We investigate what this says about Swedish society and how the popularity of the welfare state might survive growing challenges in the future.

  • @MagisterEnglish
    -5•1 month ago

    Same in Canada, at least Quebec, 50% of my taxes go in health care system, I have no family doctor, all doctors are millionaires, nurses make 100k+, people dies in ER after 48h waiting

    Education system is a joke. Teachers earn 100k+ too

    Roads are potholes

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      10•1 month ago

      Not many physicians make over a million, and the way provincial governments have set up the bureaucracy around healthcare feeds the high wages, ie: it’s not the nurses caring for patients that are making $100k per year.

        • Cosmic ClericEnglish
          5•1 month ago

          people dies in ER after 48h waiting.

          How often does that happen?

          ooften.And it has happened all across Canada.

          I’m trying to get a feel, as someone who does not live in Canada, as to how often this actually happens. If it’s really an urgent issue, or more hyperbole than anything.

          Could you elaborate further on how often this actually happens?

          Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

          • @[email protected]OPEnglish
            7•1 month ago

            Because Canada’s universal healthcare is funded by the feds and provinces, but administered by the provinces, numbers are not available. But I did find an educated guesstimate from this source put together by two Canadian physicians.

            “The extra deaths caused by emergency department crowding are so rarely counted because it’s hard to pinpoint the crowding as the proximate cause of the death. But when you look at populations and population-level data, you clearly see excess hospital deaths when emergency department crowding is worse,” he said.

            He and colleague Dr. Paul Atkinson from the department of emergency medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax tried to put a number on what they called a “hidden pandemic” of harm.

            They used a formula devised by the U.K. Royal College of Emergency Medicine and The Economist to assess the increased delays in moving patients out of the ERs into the hospital beds in that country.

            The U.K. data suggested that between 260 and 500 patients a week may be dying in excess of what would be expected when ERs are crowded.

            “If you do simple multiplication based on our population, you would find that over a year, somewhere between 8,000 and 15,000 patients are dying in Canada because of emergency department crowding,” Worrall said.