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Comment by xhkkffbf | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, the headline should read, "Tax receivers will get $4.7t less over the next decade and tax payers will get to keep that money." It's not like the money will be lost. It will just remain in the hands of the original earners who will, presumably, spend it according to their own desires instead of entrusting the tax receivers to spend it. Again, the money won't disappear.

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> It will just remain in the hands of the original earners who will, presumably, spend it according to their own desires instead of entrusting the tax receivers to spend it. Again, the money won't disappear.

Seems like you're a believer in the trickle-down economic model? Unfortunately in most cases it will be moved to a tax haven where it joins a big pile of money that will simply never be spent on anything but the incidental super yacht or a luxury mansion on a private island. Even the government can spend the money more effectively than that.

There are exceptions of course, but we shouldn't be dependent on voluntary acts of philanthropy to get the money invested back into the country that it was already owed to in the form of tax in the first place.

I don't think that was implied by the OP. OP just pointed out that "governments" and "the world" are not the same thing.

No. I'm just quibbling with the headline which implies that the money is gone. It isn't.

Once it's in a tax haven it is out of the economy, which is as good as gone.

It's the difference between somebody putting their money into a savings account and putting their money into a mattress. The money in the savings account is still being invested into the economy, the money in the mattress is functionally gone.

Just because the money is owned by an entity in a tax haven, doesn't mean they're not being invested in productive companies.

Just because the tax money is given to a government doesn't mean it's being invested in productive activities.

It's in a different part of the world. That's what the headline claimed. It claimed it would be lost to the world.

And you're wrong that it's as "good as gone." It's not. It's just to be spent by someone else.

Since the world economy is approximately 100 trillion USD annually, it doesn't seems to be less than 0.5% of annual GDP lost to such tax evasion.

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