Did your sources distinguish Norway's Gini coefficient before and after taxes?

My impression is that marginal taxation here is massive, since we have a sales tax of 25% (consumption tax, effectively), high taxes on luxury goods (cars especially), wealth tax of 0.85% of net worth every year and capital gains tax of 30% with no exemption for long-term holdings. The marginal tax rate on income is 46% IIRC, but your employer has already paid 14% of your salary in employment tax before you're paid. On top of this is property taxes, fees to local government, annual car tax etc.

If you make a complete assessment of the taxes a high-earning, high-spending person pays, it can easily surpass 70% of all income.

"wealth tax of 0.85% of net worth every year"

Interesting. That's very much in line with what my experiments showed: just on a computer model of incredibly primitive 'economics', you can use an incredibly tiny wealth tax to redistributive effect. I think you can even ditch a lot of sales, income tax etc. if you're prepared to do a wealth tax. It seems to be very effective but this is the first I've heard of it actually being done anywhere.

The Netherlands also have it, sort of.

It started of as a 30% capital gains tax, but at some point the government was like: "Math is hard, let's pretend 4% return on capital." and we effectively ended up with a 1.2% wealth tax.

In the last few years they realized that wealthier people have a higher return on capital and the effective wealth tax is more progressive with an effective wealth tax of ~1.6% at the highest bracket.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14828357 for a summary of the most important Norwegian taxes, which I posted elsewhere. Summarized as of last year.

It's not that uncommon. Many Swiss cantons have a progressive wealth tax. France used to have one but it's now limited to real estate holdings.

See [1]. Norway has a Gini index of G = 41% before taxes and G = 25% after taxes (another source said G = 27.5% after taxes).

In Germany we also get heavily taxed although I don't think it's that drastic: 19% consumption tax, 25% + 5.5% on capital gains, a marginal tax rate that linearly increases up to 42% for high-earners [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Germany

It's because Norway is one of the most heavily taxed countries in the world with a total tax burden of roughly 45% of GDP– almost 4x Hong Kong and nearly twice the US.

VAT here is a whopping 25%. Personal income tax rates border 55%. Corporate profits tax ranges from 28% to as high as 78%

Moreover revenues from Equinor also help.

Interesting to see the measure of total tax burden vs. GDP. Never heard that variant before, during discussions where it becomes obvious it's difficult to compare the tax systems of different countries. Apparently, perhaps not surprisingly, the Nordic countries top this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...