As usual, these articles are complete garbage. I can only assume at this point that they wilfully conflate the highest tax brackets with the effective tax rate since that makes for a more dramatic story.
Yes Sweden has a tax bracket that would result in north of 50% tax. For the part of your income that qualifies for that bracket. A significant part of the population doesn’t even qualify for that bracket and for those that do it’s a much smaller part of their total income.
If you earn so much that the dominating tax bracket for you is the highest one, good. System works as intended.
> Sweden 52.3%
I'm a software dev, so I'm in the top 10% of earners here. The same would apply to many hn readers I assume.
I pulled my tax statement for one of the last few years.
My 'total final tax' as a percentage of 'assessed earned income' was 27.8%.