A-M u s i n g s – Credit Where Credit’s Due

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]usings are thoughts, the thoughtful kind. For the purpose of these articles, a-musings are thoughts that might amuse, entertain and even enlighten.

For about thirty years I lived in a small village in Sweden before moving to Saint Lucia. It was where I met my wife, where our children were born and where they went to school, which in those days was a significant advantage. But these were not the only things that were positive about Sweden.

I smile to myself when I hear Trump meandering on about socialism. He doesn’t have a clue; actually he knows very little outside his corrupt real estate world, but, as my buddy Rick might say, ‘That’s for another show.’ Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of Swedish life for outsiders used to be the tax system. We paid a lot in tax but we got back so much more: free schooling, free meals, free textbooks, a state health service no American will ever experience.

And then there was the ‘Tax Calendar’ as the Swedes called it. Every year, in February I think, we had to do our taxes personally by filling in our tax forms and submitting them to the government. It didn’t matter that the government already knew how much we had earned, it was felt that by making a personal declaration we ‘owned’ our returns. It also helped the authorities know whether or not we were lying about our incomes.

The Tax Calendar was published for every community, no matter how big or small, listing every resident and taxpayer by name and occupation. It listed several things including Income, Deductions, and Tax Paid. Whenever I tell Americans this they go nuts as if one’s personal income were a state secret. For Swedes it’s just natural. Once you get used to it, the system has quite a few advantages.

First of all, everybody knows how much everybody else earns, how many deductions they make, how much tax they pay and how much they have left over after the procedure is completed. So if your neighbour is claiming that he or she lives on the breadline yet drives around in the latest Mercedes or BMW, takes vacations to the Caribbean and parties all night, you and the authorities know that something fishy is going on!

The best manifestation of my particular delight in the Tax Calendar system was our local gas station. The village only had one gas station, two stores whose clientele was divided strictly along Party Lines – one for socialists and one for the others, and one church, and nothing else. The proprietor of the gas station in the village was a simple but canny guy. He was unmarried and belonged to that group of men who travelled to Thailand for their annual sexual pleasures. I recall the first time I went to fill up my car after the annual tax calendar was published. When I tried to pay he said simply, “It’s okay, Professor (he always called me professor), I know you are good for the money.” Sometimes six months would pass before he allowed me to pay.

It’s ironic, isn’t it: those who need credit can’t get it, while those who don’t need it, easily get it. I suppose that is the unfair way of the world even in the most egalitarian of societies.