Tax what we take – not what we do

A repair technician in northern Sweden is about to replace a broken component in a washing machine. The job takes an hour and costs the customer around €80 – nearly half of which goes to taxes and payroll fees. A new washing machine, manufactured from virgin materials in a factory in Asia and shipped halfway across the world, costs €350

The customer does the math. A repair plus the uncertainty of something else breaking, or a new machine with a warranty? Often the new machine wins.

It's not the customer's fault. It's not the technician's fault. It's a tax system that sends a clear signal: people are expensive, nature is cheap

What if we flipped that?

A thought experiment

This isn't a finished policy proposal. It's a thought experiment – a way of asking: what if we had designed the system differently?

In Sweden, it costs roughly €5,000 per month to employ someone who takes home €3,000. The difference is payroll taxes – money that funds pensions, health insurance, and unemployment benefits.

Meanwhile, it costs almost nothing to extract minerals, harvest forests, or pump groundwater. Sure, environmental taxes exist, but they're marginal in comparison

What if we gradually shifted the tax burden from one to the other?

• Payroll taxes are reduced – it becomes cheaper to hire people, repair things, provide services and care
• Resources are taxed at extraction – minerals, timber, fossil fuels, water, and land get a price tag that better reflects what it costs to take them from nature
• Products are taxed by environmental impact – resource-intensive goods cost more. Second-hand, repaired, and resource-efficient alternatives become relatively cheaper

Suddenly, that washing machine repair makes economic sense. Not because we subsidised it or banned anything, but because prices finally tell the truth

Three objections

"Consumption taxes hit low-income households hardest"

True, if the money just disappears into the treasury. But what if all tax revenue is returned – equally, to every adult citizen?

Then something interesting happens: those who live resource-light get back more than they pay in. Those who consume heavily pay net. The system becomes progressive even though the tax itself is flat.

Canada already does this with its carbon tax. A family of four in Ontario receives the equivalent of around €500 per year. Most households – especially lower-income ones – come out ahead.

"Companies will move abroad"

If one country does this alone, perhaps. But if imported goods must pay the same resource fee at the border as domestic ones, the advantage of relocating production disappears

The EU has already introduced such a system for carbon-intensive materials like steel and cement. The same principle can be extended

"The welfare system collapses if payroll taxes disappear"

Not if the change happens gradually and new revenues replace the old ones. Say payroll taxes are reduced by one percentage point per year over 25 years, while resource taxes rise correspondingly. That gives businesses, households, and governments time to adapt

Why think about this now?

• Automation and AI mean that value is increasingly created with less human labour. If the tax system is built on the wage base, that base is shrinking. We need a broader foundation
• The climate and resource crisis demands that we stop treating natural resources as free inputs. The current system makes it cheap to extract and expensive to work. That's backwards

And perhaps most importantly: we need more alternatives. Not because this is the only right answer, but because we're stuck in a debate where most proposals are about tweaking at the margins. Sometimes you need a thought experiment to see that the foundations themselves can be moved

From thought experiment to prototype

Thought experiments are valuable in themselves – they expand the boundaries of what seems possible. But they become more interesting when someone tries to put them into practice

Maybe it starts with a municipality testing local resource fees on gravel extraction and using the revenue to reduce costs for local businesses. Maybe it starts with a region modelling what would happen to jobs and the economy if the tax base gradually shifted

Maybe it starts with a conversation

Get in touch

I'm looking for municipalities, regions, and people who want to discuss these questions – and above all, who want to test. Model. Calculate. See if the numbers hold

Not because I have all the answers. But because they can only be found together