It's strange to have so much detail about tax evasion without talking about tax avoidance.<p>Just because somebody keeps his money offshore and hides it from his government, doesn't necessary mean that it's illegal (Google and co are great examples of not hiding).<p>Most people want to follow the law, they just want to optimize taxes.
Every time I read something about tax evasion I wonder why there’s never a discussion about IF income tax should “exist” or not.
We take it as granted and always existed.
While for indirect taxation I think that’s pretty fair.
At what level should we expect "finDox'ing" vs "personal privacy"?<p>i.e. ; Should we expect full transparency of billionaires, but not minimum wage workers?<p>US Tax Code is horrific, and corrupt.<p>But, what do?
Stripping down seemingly disparate problems down to their bone will often reveal the wisdom behind certain 'rules of thumb':<p><pre><code> More rules disproportionately benefit those with the resources to navigate said rules.
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Be that Ivy league admissions, GDPR or lines-of-code. I believe there is a universal virtue in aspiring to make a system simpler. Every exception made with good intentions is disproportionately exploited by those it was least intended for.<p>Blaming emergent patterns on the behavior of individuals never works. We know that shaming people into avoiding sugar doesn't decrease obesity, and shaming tax evaders won't stop tax evasion. Emergent behaviors are downstream of the systems that enable them. The humans within it are no more than blind chickens following the smell of food. Civic duty can serve as a counter-flywheel levee for a bit, but give it sufficient time and it's simply a matter of when the levee breaks. <i>sorry</i><p>At the risk of sounding like a naïve libertarian: Have a small set of tall walls. Enforce those ruthlessly. Once inside, don't sweat the details. This doesn't low taxation or removal of all nuance. It means more streamlined collection. The budget can encode all the nuance afterwards. That way, each group that avails a 'tax break', has a clear $ value associated with it in the budget, instead of an unobservable 'opportunity cost' for money that was never collected in the first place.<p>Having said that, it is naïvely libertarian, because exposing the <i>true</i> subsidies that certain protected groups get in the form of a $-value, immediately makes it politically unattainable due to voter dynamics. Democracy is truly "the worst form of government" – <i>except for all the others that have been tried</i> .