Pretty sure they'd be fine with it if trillions and trillions didn't disappear into military and black budgets (ie transferring money to their friends)
this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
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it's nice to pay taxes if you can actually see the benefits somewhere
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The Swedish tax agency is pretty well respected because they have their shit together. When it's time for us to do our taxes, we get forms sent home already filled in by the tax agency, and for most people those numbers are accurate and it takes less than a minute for us to do our taxes. Send a text message and you're done. And usually what happens is you get money back.
Not to mention, their taxes go to social programs and can be seen in use, improving the lives of citizens. In the US, our roads are shit, our infrastructure in general is shit, our social programs are a fuckin joke…our tax money isn’t being used for us. That’s the biggest difference.
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Sweden has historically been ethnically close to homogeneous (until the 20th century, life in Scandinavia was hard, and few wanted to move there) and has a relatively flat social hierarchy, meaning that redistributive taxation to fund services is popular (after all, if everyone needs a specific service, having the government provide it through taxes is an economy of scale). America, meanwhile, was founded on racial slavery, which resulted in a racial hierarchy (i.e., the definition of who counts as “white” shifting over time), and there’s a non-negligible proportion of voters who would resent being taxed extra to help lift those below them in this hierarchy closer to their level.
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Its almost as though efficient utilization of tax revenue offsets the hatred of paying taxes. I just threatened my 1st cousins into pitching in $100 each to buy a 2nd cousin of ours a cello after I asker if she planned on continuing to play thru college and she said no she can't afford school, dorms and instrument rental. I looked for programs that actually helped students like her but found nothing of actual use. You can do more help with your own money than giving it to the government or charities.
It also helps if paying taxes isn't overly convoluted. The way doing taxes works for me is
- The tax agency sends out their calculations
- I complete with any complementary information (there's never been any)
- I sign off on the bank ID app
We're talking a couple of button clicks and it's done entirely online.
There's quite a lot of Swedes that complain about the taxes here still though, sadly enough
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Maybe people wouldn’t hate taxes if they were put to good use, not squandered on shit we don’t want and corruption. We have to watch as all our taxes go to pay corrupt politicians hundreds of thousands of dollars and cover all their expenses, meanwhile this year our elementary and middle schools are getting their sports/music/art classes cut because there isn’t enough budget.
That's a surprise. In most US schools they'll cut STEM and language and have rolling blackouts before they cut sports.
You’re thinking high school and college.
It’s because we get so little for those taxes. If we actually had functional services, I would feel like it’s worth it.
No you don’t. You pay a little and get a little. Go live in a country where you actually pay a lot and get nothing and then you’ll have a case.
I don’t really care if someone has it worse. We should still strive to do better. I don’t think that’s relevant.
It would be nice to get something for that money. However little or however much it is. Functional services, a social safety net for example. I’d certainly be willing to pay more to have those services. A functioning healthcare system would be nice. I think you would get fewer complaints if the benefits were most obvious.
Also Sweden’s population is about the size of Los Angeles county. Every time I see Scandinavia held up as something to aspire to folks should remember how small and historically homogenous these countries are.
Comparing the US to the EU as a whole is a much more accurate way to look at things, with us states being akin to eu member countries.
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We’re losing that in Sweden though. Public healthcare is becoming more and more under funded. Doctors barely have time to treat patients, so they’re often sending patients home with prescribed paracetamol.
The only way to get proper healthcare nowadays is through private healthcare, if you can afford it. I know many who haven’t gotten proper healthcare until they sought private healthcare. It sucks, because it used to be great.
And people vote for that shit because politicians dangle tax cuts in front of their faces. It's really sad to see swedes fall for the lower taxes scam, when our entire thing is built on taxes.
Naw, the issue is more with corruption creeping into the public system. Swedish society used to have a high degree of trust within the system due to a rather homogenous culture and relatively short social hierarchy, and as such structures of enforcement were rather unneccessary.
It's become a lot more pressured as time goes on though, inefficiencies, abuse of public funds, straight up corruption which has created huge hole in the public purse - in addition to a sharp rise in organized crime and tax evasion among small businesses such as restaurants and shops.
Corruption is absolutely on the rise. And many opportunistic assholes are utilizing privatization as a vector to abuse the system. However, people still vote for lower taxes and that is a huge problem, especially when we find ourselves in a situation where so many institutions need more tax funding.
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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
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.
people dies in ER after 48h waiting
How often does that happen?
Tbh even once is too often. And it has happened all across Canada.
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?
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.
Thank you.
Edit: Jebus, 'Thank you' gets downvotes? Man, tough room. /adjustsshirtcollar
You're very welcome.
"Government doesn't work, we need less government" said unironically by the person elected to run the government.
It’s like how they’ve installed that DeJoy person to dismantle the Postal Service from inside out and then complain that the Postal Service is having issues, so we should ~~privatize~~ donate the business to rich people so their disgusting amounts of wealth can trickle down on our faces or something.
It still wouldn't for the vast number of brainwashed people who don't think beyond "the government is taking some of my paycheck!"
Because a lot of those people are the same people who say things like, "why should I have to pay for universal health care when I'm healthy?"
Americans have been taught to hate taxes. They have been sold the idea that the original concept of "no taxation without representation" didn't include the latter two words. Decades of Republicans demonizing taxes have done it.
It's more like a lot of people don't feel like they are being represented. I wouldn't complain if my taxes were housing homeless people or funding space exploration, but instead they're funding 37 wars.
Plenty of people would complain if their taxes were housing homeless people or funding space exploration though.
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Nah they've been taught to hate government. Reagan finalized this with his "the scariest words you can ever hear are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'". He defined the government and anything the government does as bad and evil. This is the whole "get government to the size you can drown it in a bathtub". This naturally goes to taxes are feeding the big evil government, so taxes are just as bad.
Exactly. We’re also taught not to see the value we receive from our tax paying. And to fear and hate the IRS (especially since we have to file our tsxes
well swedes also get value for their taxes. I remember one who would talk about how it drove him nuts coming across pot holes and various broken infrastructure as it would be unacceptable for it to be like that for weeks were he was from.
Yeah, re-paving happens all the time here. I visited Massachusetts back in 2019 and was shocked at the abysmal state of the roads.
yeah and that was a place with pretty good infrastructure and upkeep for the us.
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Right, but there's a reason we don't get value for our taxes and that reason is also Republicans. Especially Reagan.
oh yeah and we end up paying more in local taxes than any reduction we ever got on federal ones.
That and the growing unrest due to wage gaps and our taxes not benefitting our society.
Which is also due to Republicans cutting all social services and resisting new ones.
Pair that with the GOP systematically destroying public institutions by gutting public funding as much as possible while simultaneously eroding public trust. Our public education system? It used to be the best in the world until Regan and Bush I and II tore it to shreds. Same with our healthcare system. All in the name of privatization.
If it actually did result in republicans being crushed under a giant domino, at least we'd have that going for us.
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