Is inflation actually man-made? In my book, yes.
Sweden doesn’t keep an official tally of every tax and fee. A conservative guess lands somewhere between 20 and 30 main ones. Break the excise duties and related charges down further and the number climbs.
What really grinds my gears is the stacking. Clear examples of taxes that themselves get hit with 25 % VAT include energy tax, carbon dioxide tax, alcohol tax, tobacco tax, chemical tax, and the tax on third-party liability insurance.
Fuel is the cleanest illustration. The base price gets energy tax added. Then carbon dioxide tax is added as a separate fixed amount per litre. Only after that does the 25 % VAT get calculated on the whole pile — base price + energy tax + carbon dioxide tax.
You’re paying tax on the tax. The same logic applies to a long list of other goods.
This isn’t the elegant compound interest you read about in finance books. This is the bureaucratic version — less elegant, more permanent, and far better at quietly raising the price of everything you buy.
If this structure doesn’t help manufacture higher prices, I’m not sure what does.
Got another tax-on-tax example that still makes your eye twitch? Drop it in the comments. Or just share this if you’ve ever stared at a fuel receipt and muttered something unprintable.
I’ve written about man-made inflation before. Back in 2022 I argued that a big part of what we saw was driven by energy policy failures and the decisions made during the pandemic: