The Swedish Theory of Love: Individualism and Social Trust in Modern Sweden by Henrik Berggren & Lars Trägårdh

Author:Henrik Berggren & Lars Trägårdh [Berggren, Henrik & Trägårdh, Lars]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Nordic Countries, Literary Collections, Essays, Literary Criticism, European, Scandinavian
ISBN: 9780295750545
Google: Fw26zgEACAAJ
Publisher: U of Washington Press
Published: 2022-09-15T20:31:50+00:00

THE DISCREET CHARM OF SWEDISH TAX POLICY

The first major question that Group 222 debated, and that it wanted to put high on the political agenda, concerned family taxation. The battle was between those who wanted to retain the existing policy of joint taxation for spouses and those who wanted to introduce separate taxation or—as they preferred to call it—individual taxation.

The reform radically changed the situation for married women who were choosing between paid work and a traditional housewife role. Joint taxation had created a so-called threshold effect by which a woman’s salary was taxed heavily when she reentered the labor market after having been at home with children. The family had already benefited from her deductible, which her husband had included in his own tax declaration, and her salary was also subject to a higher marginal tax rate as a result of being assessed together with her husband’s salary, in effect as an addition to his salary.

From the family’s point of view—rather than the woman’s—this could be considered a net loss. Not only did the family lose the woman’s unpaid labor in the home, her net earnings were fairly meager. As Romanus explained laconically, “A man who was not particularly keen on his wife getting a job outside the home could easily show that her work would not bring much money into the family.”34 This was compounded by the need to spend money on childcare if the woman worked while the children were still young, since subsidized childcare would not be available until the 1970s.

Individual taxation would do away with this barrier and open the door for women to move into the labor market.35 The 1960s were boom times for Sweden’s economy, and one of the pressing questions was how to get more people into the workforce. Women were seen as an “unexploited labor resource” that government, trade unions, and businesses were all anxious to utilize. Yet this crass perspective cannot be divorced from or given primacy over the more ideological question of equality, both gender and class, and the principle of individual autonomy. Tellingly, Gustav Persson, who early on engaged with the preschool issue from the perspectives of gender equality and the labor market, was a member of Group 222 as well as LO—and he was far from being the only link between LO and gender equality issues.36

Another important forum was Conference 65 (Rådslag 65), an advisory group that was jointly organized in January 1965 by LO and the Social Democratic Party as a way to involve more people in the formulation of concrete policy. The deliberations of Conference 65 led to the publication of Familjen i morgondagens samhälle (The Family in Tomorrow’s Society), intended to serve as the basis for further studies and discussions. It also published Resultat och reformer (Results and Reforms), to be read in tandem with The Family in Tomorrow’s Society. It offered a vision of the new family as characterized by emotional warmth, gender equality, and democracy between men, women, and children—in contrast to the masculine dictatorship that was sometimes said to be the hallmark of the old family.

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