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Comment by charlesdm | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying how it is and that it's a problem that is very hard to fix. For wealthy people, tax is just another expense to push as close to zero as possible.

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I completely agree that it's a hard problem. I don't think there's a fix that involves lowering the tax burden on the wealthy, though. You can dump more taxes on the middle class and effectively reduce the level of avoidance but I don't think that's a net gain for society. I think it would actually be a huge loss.

So sad you're downvoted. The solution is ruthless enforcement of the tax code, with extreme punitive fines for evasion.

> The solution is ruthless enforcement of the tax code, with extreme punitive fines for evasion.

Evasion has always been illegal, avoidance is structuring a transaction in a way so that it ends up being taxed at a lower rate, but in a legal way. Ruthless enforcement is already happening today in most western european countries.

> Ruthless enforcement is already happening today in most western european countries.

Oh please. It took 6 years for the EU to penalize Ireland for the double irish/dutch sandwich avoidance mechanism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-30/apple-ire...

Well.. countries are allowed to set their own tax laws. That’s part of what makes a country. Fiscal sovereignty right there. Ireland (obviously) purposely created their tax framework so it would allow for this kind of behaviour. The world is battling for the tax dollars of wealthy people and their corporations. The EU ruling is just an initial opinion of the EU commission. It’ll have to go through the ECJ first.

Countries are starving for tax income and have very clear conflicts of interests: they want to 1) tax their normal residents as much as possible, but at the same time 2) hand out low tax “freebies” to non residents (or HNWIs) so they will book some of their taxable profits in their jurisdictions. This needs to stop (globally) before you can effectively combat avoidance. But I doubt it’s ever going to happen.

> Oh please. It took 6 years for the EU to penalize Ireland for the double irish/dutch sandwich avoidance mechanism.

That's because it's not a clear-cut legal issue. It's pretty much the EU versus everyone else on this one. Even the US government is unhappy about the EU ruling, even though the US government has gone after Apple for its tax practices fairly recently.

That's been the solution since at least Roman times. It doesn't actually work. People with a lot of money are a lot more mobile than the rest of us.

And for you it is not? You donate your income to the government?

I don't, but many normal people know close to nothing about taxes and end up overpaying / not optimising sufficiently.

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