Nobody who says they want to pay extra tax means it

I am so heartily tired of hypocritical people who live in Sweden and pay one of the world's highest tax burdens according to Wikipedia, who say or post on various platforms that they want to pay even more in taxes. It is entirely possible to pay a voluntary tax in Sweden and it is not even particularly difficult.

According to Swedish law, the Swedish Tax Agency, Sweden's equivalent to the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS), may not charge an individual an extra tax, not even if the individual himself wants it. However, there is a loophole that was described in a Swedish newspaper, SVD, back in 2015.

The only thing anyone who wants to pay extra tax needs to do is pay the extra tax in cash. You put the money in an unmarked envelope and put the envelope in one of the Tax Agency's special declaration boxes.

The money cannot then be booked against a specific individual and will end up in a balance account for seven years before being added to the state's coffers. It is extremely rare that someone pays additional tax in unmarked envelopes, but it has happened. Internally at the Swedish Tax Agency, the anonymous donations are called "conscience money", which indicates that it is NOT the people who want to signal goodness who make these donations.

Personally, I want to pay less tax, mainly because the enormous amount of tax money Swedish taxpayers pay every year enables the enormous waste and irresponsible way politicians treat the Swedish tax money. For example, the Swedish Left Party donated Swedish tax money in 2023 with the help of the Swedish aid agency SIDA to the Palestinian organization DFLP which participated in the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Something that even the state-owned Swedish television (SVT) had to report on despite their high number of employees of both environmental and left-wing activists.

AI generated image with Grok