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Comment by anonymouzz | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, especially because tax avoidance is an insanely difficult problem to fight once it gets big enough. I mean it's impossible to prosecute at once even 10% of the country for not paying taxes.

Imagine the US going through a Greece episode, which was caused in big part by tax avoidance. To this day it's perfectly fine in Greece to ask for a ~20% "cash discount" in almost any shop, which of course means simply not paying the VAT tax (similar to the US sales tax).

Edit: let me self-correct - this does not seem to be an actual problem in the US - with this plot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion#Government_respo...

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The US has a very high tax compliance rate because most of our income is reported through 3rd parties (w2, 1099, etc.). For income that is not reported through a 3rd party, we have low compliance rates as well. For income subject to little or no information reporting, the misreported income is 63% of total according to the IRS. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/p1415.pdf

>> because most of our income is reported through 3rd parties

For most people and most of their income. I seriously doubt it true that most income, as in >50% of all income earned by all US entities, is so reported. Corporate income is massive. Corporations, the wealthy, private contractors ... their income is not automatically reported. Note too that "income" includes all income, not just net profits subject to tax.

Indeed. It is trivially easy to get people to conspire to evade taxes for the benefit of other people for similar payment to that they could get working for clean companies when they could pay massive fines or go to prison for doing so. Equally it is simple to find these people when any one of them could go to the government and inform them of your illegal actions when first informed or as a whistleblower after years doing so.

The difference between the US and Mexico in terms of corruption is not that the people in the US are pure of heart, it’s that coordinating corrupt and illegal activities is next to impossible when law enforcement are clean.

> when law enforcement are clean

What are some differences between law enforcement in the US and Mexico?

Fundamentally, that the FBI is run by people who don’t take bribes and who promote people who find corruption in state or local law enforcement or other government offices. In Mexico there are states where the chief of police is owned by the narcos, in the US, a single department being corrupt from top to bottom is probably the biggest scandal since WWII.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal

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