Paper short abstract:

Collective investment is a popular way for Swedish pensioners today to describe the building of the Swedish welfare state. However, increasing national inequality leads many to ask if their embrace of an investment imaginary disabled redistributive arguments with consequences only now unfolding.

Paper long abstract:

Imaginaries around fiscal flows and how they related to issues of ideologies and the everyday are key to any tax system’s political and popular success. Based on ethnographic research with pensioners in Sweden, this paper explores ideas of how fiscal flows produce society and the individual taxpayer’s part in this. The research participants, all young during the building of the Swedish welfare state, the so called ‘people’s home’ (folkhemmet) in the 40s and 50s, shared a discourse about taxpayment in the twentieth century as being about building a new Sweden together, an act of collective investment. Notably this investment narrative was a societal move away from earlier calls by worker’s movements for redistribution. However, while investment had been key to the fiscal imaginary of my research participants’ working lives, they expressed concern for growing inequalities in contemporary Sweden, the tax system’s inability to redistribute effectively, and ‘investment’ as a failed type of fiscal flow. Investment narratives were simultaneously seen as key to building Swedish welfare and central to the bit-by-bit dismantling of fiscal measures aimed at redistribution.