Typing it out from page 73:
It’s not like Bergman was a particularly rich person either - he just happened to own a business. Since a business is a seperate legal entity, most other nations have a double taxation system where earnings of business are taxed and the distribution of those earnings is taxed. Interestingly, the Swedish system put the burden of business tax on the personal owner, and had him pay more money than he earned by digging it out from his savings.
That does sort of remind me of this whole top 1% deal that the Americans keep mentioning. The number of millionaires only increased, because everybody started selling their houses in the financial crisis (as the notoriously arrogant Lee Doren of How The World Works fame explained recently), bringing people earning $40,000 a year suddenly into the millionaire category for that given year. The rest of the “very rich” earning above $250,000 a year are not generally businessmen, but engineers, high-technology professionals, and Silicon Valley computer scientists. They are employed; they don’t own their own businesses.
Discussion of the “top 1%” has supposed all of them to be businessmen, but actual businessmen draw out very little, and plough most of their earnings in their business itself. Extremely successful Marwar businessmen in India are notorious for living in low rent apartments and driving lowest end cars, because they save or reinvest most of what they earn, due to business uncertainty. Lean periods have them living off savings only. Complications of tax system somehow put greater burden on businessmen, and not necessarilly on those who do earn far more in actual tangible, day-to-day terms.