If the government wants a tax to be paid they need to make it simple and unconditional. If there are loopholes or ways to legally avoid it, they will be discovered and people will take advantage of them.
In a good and just society there is a large overlap between them, and in others there is less overlap.
But it's impossible to build a legal system where there is a 100% overlap, and it would most likely be a broken society in other ways.
I totally agree with your second paragraph, that the government needs to remove loopholes and other ways for people to weasel out of contributing to society. But there will always be some corruption and a lot of money to be earned by only taking from our shared resources and never contributing back.
I strongly disagree with this one. It's not that hard to not define loopholes and exceptions. Really, a simplified tax system without such should be the goal, and then the circles so match.
the people with money prefer being able to employ someone to essentially skip paying altogether.
But if they couldn't - because there are no exceptions and loopholes - society would be better off.
If you’re going to argue the majority, then I’ll remind you that the majority had no problem with slavary either not too long ago in Western nations.
If you’re goning to argue democratic values, then I’ll remind you that many brutal dictators also rose to power by the same values.
So put another way , by which definition of morality are we drawing this diagram?
I’m actually in favor of removing all charity exemptions too. They are just used by rich people to spend our money (the taxes they owe) on pet projects depriving everybody of that income.
I'm all for removing loopholes where it's possible. However
- It's not "our money". It's money that, we a society, feel validated in taking from members of our society to pay for things that make our society better. But it is, in no way, "our money". We're taking it from people, at force, because we believe it's worth it.
- The only taxes that are "owed" are the ones defined by the rules (laws); pretty much by definition. If the rule doesn't say they owe it, then they don't owe it.
If you're only going to pick one thing that a government does, yeah, it's easy to cherrypick something awful. But the alternative is literal anarchy, which is a) much, much worse for the vast majority of people, and b) 100% guaranteed not to last, as the people either organically organize a government from the bottom up, or some violent strongman (gender-neutral) (but let's face it, probably a man in practice) emerges and enforces an authoritarian government from the top down. And in either of those cases, they'll levy taxes very soon, whether it's to make sure that the things that a representative government needs can happen, or just to take as much as they can from everyone else.
Yes, it should be, because in addition to complex tax systems introducing loopholes and exceptions, they also become more complex to collect.
If taxes were simple and straightforward, you would sink an entire industry in the US. There's a whole money pit around just getting money from people to their government. That's money you could, instead, be getting as taxes.
While I agree that taxes provide for a lot of useful, wonderful things, taxes also provide for things I find morally repugnant.
So yes, we should all pay our taxes. But at the same time, I'm fine taking advantage of any legal methods available to me to reduce my tax burden.
The only thing that sucks about that is that tax avoidance generally becomes easier as you get wealthier, which is unfair.
If you want to use a the software analogy it's advocating for using a simple monolith you can maintain with <10 people vs a distributed micro service architecture you're working on with hundreds of devs and has countless non essential features which can break the spirit of the system if used in conjunction.
Drafting a simple tax system is easy. The thing that would be borderline impossible is getting it passed into law because of vested interests