I was born into a family with a father who worked 7 days a week all my growing up to support my mother, my two sisters and myself. My mother was a stay at home mom until I, the oldest child, turned 17, at which point she was genuinely tired of spending her days alone waiting for us three children to come home only to be fed and then disappear again.
My 77 year old father still works but only 6 days a week while my 75 year old mother works 4 days a week. Although my parents have always worked in their own companies and are thus entrepreneurs, I have grown up in a working-class environment. It took many years before they had a stable economy.
Mom has told me that my grandmother mailed us food every Thursday for several years so that our food would last the whole week. Both my father and mother were very careful that none of us three children would notice how poor it was, and we didn't.
The only thing missing was all the trips abroad that our friends made. I was 14 years old the first time we traveled by plane. One would think that such an environment would raise socialist children and adults.
Neither my mother nor my father is a socialist and it would be a lie to say that I was not influenced to some degree by this.
I was 19 years old when I got my first job at an accounting firm where I helped smaller companies with their accounting. It was then that I understood for the first time how much tax is actually paid in Sweden.
I know that my parents are no exception, but there are lots of people who work and struggle just as much as them. That's why I get extremely angry and disappointed every time I'm in any way informed about how politicians waste tax money because I know how much work, toil and sacrifice is behind every penny.
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