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Comment by yunohn | Hacker News Reader

> elected officials have an extremely strong bias to adding/amending versus repealing/scaling back

I find this to be a crippling problem of how politics works in modern democracies.

Taxes are a great example, because almost every country will increase it, but never decrease it. They’ll think of a 100 new ways to extract taxes, but never remove outdated ones.

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Not necessarily. 50s / 60s US income tax is much, much higher than current rate. I just think the cycle of going up and down is extremely long.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Margina...

This is where supportability comes into play: a short time after the was people understood the need for such measure, today you would have a revolution for such a tax level. In 20 years it will come back, no worries, people will love it.

The top rates were much higher but few people actually paid those high rates due to loopholes.

These days people are paying more in real terms in aggregate.

I’m not sure about that either —- there were no tax havens back then. It’s so much easier since 80s to work around the tax system with off shore companies (granted it is getting harder for the past decade)

Or was I unaware the widespread loophole back in the old days?

Not so much a loophole, but back in the 50s all kinds of income were treated the same which meant you could write off your income against your investment losses.

I think it's naive to assume that rich Americans back then weren't working the system. If it was so great, why do we tax different kinds of income differently now?

I have always believed that the majority of the complexity in the tax code is derived from lobbying by special interests to lower taxes on their specific sort of income.

Lately though it seems like tax filing companies have been the ones primarily responsible for sustaining the complexity of the tax code - though whenever someone's particular benefit comes up that group tends to get pretty vocal (i.e. exemptions for SALT taxes and home owner/child credits)

Very true: my personal solution is to shop for better countries. There's no way to meaningfully influence the government's overreach. Hopefully this will become a trend and the cheapest countries will attract better talent.

UN, WHO, WEF, WTO, and more... Where will you shop to as these unelected organizations gradually ascend?

> Hopefully this will become a trend and the cheapest countries will attract better talent.

Hrm, I disagree. I think the most beneficial countries will attract better talent. Having a low tax bill doesn't mean much if I need to pay for things privately.

I also personally emigrated from the US owing to the fact that healthcare there is immoral and it felt like (about a decade ago when I left) the country was on the path to major unrest. I've been quite happy up here in Canada where I pay more taxes but get to work with people who aren't burdened down by the stress of untreated health issues.

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