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How to not pay your taxes legally, apparently

(mrsteinberg.com)
113 points jimhi | 3 comments | 05 Jul 25 18:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.817s | source
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SoftTalker ◴[05 Jul 25 19:35 UTC] No.44474976[source]▶
What on earth is wrong with not paying taxes legally? What taxes does anyone pay other than those that they must pay?

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.

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capitol_ ◴[05 Jul 25 19:58 UTC] No.44475113[source]▶
What is legal and what is moral are two circles in a venn diagram.

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.

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ffsm8 ◴[05 Jul 25 20:54 UTC] No.44475466[source]▶
> 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 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.

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1. Analemma_ ◴[05 Jul 25 21:52 UTC] No.44475869[source]▶
To have a tax sytem with no loopholes would almost certainly require having no credits or deductions. I actually think there's something to that idea, but politically it's an absolute non-starter: taxpayers love the credits and deductions they have now and don't want to give them up, and governments love using them to shape policy and don't want to give up that particular tool in the toolchest.
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2. alpinisme ◴[05 Jul 25 23:30 UTC] No.44476388[source]▶
One of the quirks of the current system is that subsidies are pitched as decreases to what one owes in taxes. There would be more transparency (but more overhead) if everyone paid full sticker price for taxes and then the govt separately gave money to the groups whose behaviors it wanted to encourage or whose challenges it wanted to help with (or fined the ones whose behaviors it wanted to discourage). This would not be feasible either politically. But it would bring transparency and clarity.
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3. BenjiWiebe ◴[06 Jul 25 03:11 UTC] No.44477516[source]▶
One way the government wins with the current method is when the non-refundable tax credit is greater than the amount you owe in taxes.