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Comment by Y-bar | Hacker News Reader

Dividend and capital gains taxes are a flat 30% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Sweden#Corporate_a...)

In Finland the tax treatment for dividends is even friendlier.

If you have a 1.5M balance sheet, you can pay yourself 120k euros in dividends annually at an effective tax rate of only 7.5%.

Let’s just say that small businesses and professionals have very good lobbyists. An employee making 120k / year pays over 40% tax.

This creates a tremendous incentive for professionals to incorporate and use every trick in the books to build up a larger balance sheet on paper.

This type of comparison needs to add corporate income tax (20%) in order to be an apples to apples comparison,so 27.5. It's still a stark difference in taxation, and I know of no other country that does what Finland does for dividend taxation. In fact for earned income,things look even uglier when you add in tax-like social security contributions.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Finnish companies are also an outlier in paying extremely high dividends.

In Norway it's 37.8%. Though you do get "skjermingsrente" (about the same rate as the central bank rate) on the amount you originally invested (ie.: not on any untaxed gains you've had).

This is clever. In particular in inflationary times you are being taxed on non-real gains - this seems to alleviate that.

For stocks on the stock market, yes, but not if it is your own private company. Then the taxes are much higher.

That’s after corporate income tax of about 20%

Plus 25% VAT when you spend it.

No, some things in Sweden are 0% VAT, others 6%, others 12%, and the rest 25%.

https://www.skatteverket.se/servicelankar/otherlanguages/eng...

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