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Comment by robert_foss | Hacker News Reader

As a Swede:

1) Cheating on taxes is quite literally stealing from every other person in the country. That being said I think there is a lot of small scale cheating going, especially for small cash-driven businesses.

2) There's no hostility towards entrepreneurs as far as I've seen it, quite the opposite. However people in general do seem to realize that there is a very real tradeoff between business interests and the interests of citizens. You can't have 0% corporate tax and free healthcare and education.

As for Uber Pop, the drivers are not volunteers and are simply either taxed for the profits they make through Uber Pop or they can do actual not-for-profit car pooling.

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"As a Swede: 1) Cheating on taxes is quite literally stealing from every other person in the country."

Yes - thanks for this.

You made my point better than I could.

'Cheating on taxes' is seen as much more of an 'immoral crime' in Scandinavia, than in other places.

In Canada, 'cheating on taxes' is seen like maybe 'cheating a payment' or something. It's 'wrong' obviously, but there is not a 'stigma'.

For whatever reasons (socialized culture, very small community where cause/effect are direct - I don't know? - you tell me :)) - cheating on taxes is a 'much bigger deal', socially, and probably even legally.

But you said it better than I did :)

>You can't have 0% corporate tax and free healthcare and education.

I don't think this was really your point, but is there any particular reason you think there's a need for corporate tax, rather than just taking the same money via capital gains tax?

   You can't have 0% corporate tax 
   and free healthcare and education.

Sure you can. You tax more elsewhere, e.g. higher VAT, higher income tax, higher captial gains, higher giraffe tax ... The possibilities are infinite.

Taxation is ultimately a social tool to organise how people work as a group/nation, who does what etc.

I think Estonia has or had 0% corporate tax.

Right, just to clarify. You can have 0% corporate tax rate, you just have to recoup those taxes elsewhere.

And as corporations are benefiting from free education and healthcare they clearly should pay into that system too.

I think you should study the field of tax incidence a bit.

Corporate tax actually falls on shareholders and workers. It sounds nice: tax those faceless corporations and not us nice citizens. But the actual end result is not necessarily what one may think.

You will of course find lots of material claiming this and that about corporation tax, because people are passionate about it, but for some balance, this is a summary I picked at random:

https://hbr.org/2014/08/who-pays-corporate-taxes-possibly-yo...

(And in case of Sweden, consider that it is a particularly open economy.)

Estonia has 20% corporate tax according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax . Sweden has 22% according to the same document. Not a world of difference.

Reducing corporate friendliness to the tax rate is overly simplified of course. Sweden is on the whole a rather easy to start a company in, there is one single government entity to deal with and it can all be done online. There are relaxed accounting rules unless you reach a certain size etc.

> Cheating on taxes is quite literally stealing from every other person in the country.

Does Sweden use some sort of flat fee tax system -- e.g. take the total annual expenses and divide by the population and everyone pays the same amount? If not, then I'd ask whether it's stealing for a person to make less than another person and therefore pay less taxes.

Definition of stealing: Taking something you're not entitled to. People are entitled to make less money and pay fewer taxes as a result.

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