
The Paradise Papers: How Ridiculously Easy It Is for the Rich to Avoid Taxes - obi1kenobi
https://rantt.com/the-paradise-papers-how-ridiculously-easy-it-is-for-the-rich-to-avoid-taxes-15b082cffb68
======
matt_wulfeck
> _In the Caymans, your service provider, a local law firm, will offer a
> choice of cookie cutter plans with layers of trusts and corporations in
> other secrecy jurisdictions, which will make it impossible for the tax man
> to pin down who actually owns the account._

The IRS just asks you if you have offshore holdings, in which you either tell
the truth or perjure yourself.

As far as I can tell, a lot of the labyrinthine layers are designed so that
maybe you can lie to them without actually lying. Or at least say that to
yourself.

I bet a lot of the nouveau riche from developing countries use a service like
this not to avoid taxes, but to avoid their shaky government from
nationalizing their bank accounts.

~~~
charlesdm
> The IRS just asks you if you have offshore holdings, in which you either
> tell the truth or perjure yourself.

Say an offshore foundation is set up to benefit your family. You then make a
loan of $10MM to it, that is then invested in some company. The foundation
receives annual dividends of $1MM from this company, which are given (through
a loan, salary or a sort of stipend) to your son living abroad.

Do you own or control this foundation in the eyes of the law? The answer could
be either yes or no, depending on the country you live in. Sometimes the
answer isn't a clear yes or no either.

~~~
3pt14159
If there is any ability for you to access the value at all, even in the case
of bankruptcy, then yes you own the foundation, company, contract, work of
art, crytpo-currency, etc.

I understand this doesn't mesh with multi-party signatures on the blockchain,
but that's at least an argument to be made that you constructed a situation
where you couldn't access it as a manner of evading being forced to do so, so
it kinda breaks that you do still have access to it.

------
jasode
I don't think this article actually explains how the rich are _avoiding_ taxes
using these layered schemes of trustees and powers of attorney.

First, let's set aside _corporations_ like Apple earning foreign income and
not repatriating it or claiming Ireland tax jurisdiction or special treatment
EU doesn't like. For this story, I'm specifically interested in the mechanisms
_citizens_ use to evade taxes.

To me, the journalists are conflating 2 situations:

1) hiding money & assets (rich people like to hide money from spouses and
their divorce lawyers, or hide them from lawsuits)

2) not declaring money to evade taxes

A lot of the money that the rich store at the islands _has already been seen
by the IRS_ and taxes were paid on it. Therefore, I'm not getting a clear
picture of which situation dominates...is it hiding money or evading taxes? If
its evading taxes, I'd prefer the author explain _that_ in more detail.
Outlining the opaque layers of ownership doesn't really explain the tax
evasion part.

I ask this question because I read a book about "protecting your assets" and
the techniques that author Jan D. Weir talks about _overlap_ with hiding
legally obtained money that all lawful taxes have been paid on.

~~~
charlesdm
1\. These journalists don't understand the half of it. All of these
structures, mechanics etc serve a purpose, and while most journalists do a
decent job of describing what the rich use (i.e. trusts, companies,
foundations, PoA, etc) they don't actually describe why they do it.

2\. Avoidance is not evasion. These really shouldn't be lumped all together
because there is a massive difference.

3\. Even if they get rid of all pure (Cayman Islands style) tax havens
tomorrow, the rich won't be paying more in tax. They would then go to more
respectable jurisdictions, such as Luxembourg, Switzerland, (for non
Americans) the US, Singapore, etc.

~~~
mattmanser
I think your 3rd point is way off base, this is the whole point about
avoidance. The rich are using the disparities between the laws systems to
avoid tax and _that 's_ what needs fixing. You shouldn't be able to make a
billion $$$ in the UK, for example, and then claim you actually earnt it in
Luxembourg.

If we, the UK tax payers, gave you the eduction, the opportunities, the law
systems, the safety provided by our armies, foreign office, judicial systems,
social safety nets and care from our health system, as well as all the other
tangibles and intangibles that I could probably list for a couple of pages,
you should pay back your share into the society. And yes, that's a percentage,
not a fixed amount.

The social contract of societies is being broken by these avoidance schemes.
You luck out in the business lottery, then you pay up to help the rest of us.
You'll still be stinking rich.

And in the eyes of most people there's not much difference between avoidance
and evasion, just the law.

I think that's where a lot of the problem stems from, as long as the
politicians keep saying "it's ok, but we need to tweak this and that" and
giving sweetheart deals out to the rich not available to the rest of us, the
public think "this is really not ok, it's totally unacceptable", we're going
to keep getting Trumps, Farages, Le Pens and Brexits happening in western
democracies.

I think the general feeling is that the rich "got away" unpunished with the
2008 crash and now the scale of their tax avoidance is emerging, on top of the
income gap widening, it's only going to get worse and politicians seem
unwilling to change course and if they don't we'll all be in for some really
nasty surprises in the next 10/20 years.

~~~
rayiner
Where do you draw the line between legitimate avoidance and illegitimate
avoidance? My wife and I bought a house in order to lower our tax bill. I
think it's wrong to have a huge tax deduction primarily benefiting people who
already are well off. But is that illegitimate avoidance? What about estate
planning, which encourages individuals to divest assets to their kids on a
certain schedule so as to maximize how much of their nursing home care is paid
for by Medicare/Medicaid instead of their own assets. Is that illegitimate
avoidance? How about deferring capital gains tax on the sale of equities by
instead taking a loan using the equities as collateral. What differentiates
these things?

~~~
roel_v
Well it's obvious - when it's done by someone in my income class and I expect
to do it at some point in the future, it's fine and I'm already paying enough
in taxes; but when it's done by someone who has more money than I do, they're
thieving capitalists who should be thrown in jail.

------
dpiers
| Both of these Papers were revealed by an organization with the cumbersome
name of The International Consortium of Independent Journals (ICIJ) — a group
in need of a new name and a publicity agent

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The name is fine and
the authors (extremely basic) facts are wrong.

~~~
black_puppydog
Yeah. I am really happy about the ICIJ's work here, but I stopped reading this
after seeing that the author didn't get the name right and then explicitely
talked about the name.

Luckily, there's plenty of good coverage on the topic. For example, I really
enjoyed the (German) mini-podcast by the NDR:
[http://www.ndr.de/info/podcast4360.html](http://www.ndr.de/info/podcast4360.html)

------
projectramo
The "hacker" response to this paper:

Is it true that they can easily hide this money? It seems like a complicated
process. Once you have an account, how does one do anything with it?

Is it illegal or is this perfectly legal? If it is illegal and there is an
enforcement mechanism, this is not that different from drug smuggling or just
theft. Of course it happens, but we should be looking at the scale of the
problem.

Can anyone do it? They claim its for the rich but they also claim the filing
fee is $100.

The non-hacker response:

We don't want no politics.

~~~
Erwin
First you have to send your money to your foreign account. If you have earned
it as wages and it's in your ordinary bank account, you have already paid
quite a lot of taxes. Your employer will probably not be comfortable sending
your paycheck to the Virgin Islands.

Maybe if you own a piece of a company, nobody knows about it and you sell it
without your tax authority know it, you can get it deposited somewhere. But
normally such sales require extensive documentation to IRS.

So what you most likely evade is the capital gains tax on your stock
investment profits done from the tax heaven.

If you still want to live in the country you owe money, you can then get an
ATM or Visa card that lets you access your foreign account and pay for the
minor things, but you may not be able to buy a house and put it on your credit
card.

Many countries also have a limit on how much you can pay for with cash, and
how much cash you can even transfer across borders without declaring it
(10,000 EUR in EU).

The Danish and Swedish tax authorities have been watching both activities in
the last 10 years: if you somehow transferred a million dollars to the Cayman
Islands, they might ask a few hard questions. If you were using a Visa card to
pay for a hotel or restaurant, that came from a tax heaven, they might have
found you too through another project that analyzed foreign Visa usage that
wasn't consistent with tourists.

No significant high profile arrests came of it though -- they mostly settled
without significant penalty. The tax haven money transfer resulted in approx
150 million USD extra tax (which is a good for just 125 man-years spent).

The credit card investigation gave approximately 70 million, but of that just
10% was actual penalties -- in most cases it seems like the money was treated
as income adjustment.

Sadly, the Danish tax authorities were then embarrassed by the biggest tax
fraud ever, on a far larger scale then factory owners stashing money in Cayman
Islands -- a massive 2 billion dollar fraud involving claiming back withheld
dividend tax under double-taxation. They've only found 15% of the money so
far...

------
gcb0
if everything happens with unvalidated documents, why we never hear about
falsaries emptying bank accounts?

e.g. if I hide all my money in a trustee fund with an unregistered document,
and I get it back by showing the bank the trust contract plus a signed
document from the trust asignee, and none of those are registered anywhere
(which the article calls secret documents), wouldn't it be trivial to falsify
both of them, specially now that most accounts became public?

~~~
marcosdumay
We would never hear about that, either it happening or not.

------
jijji
When a US citizen does business overseas, putting the money into a offshore
bank account outside the united states makes absolutely a lot of sense. The
article makes it appear that people are somehow doing something wrong by doing
business outside of their home country and then not bringing the money back to
their home country. The big reason people don't bring the money back to their
home country is because the money is subject to tariffs and fees which have
nothing to do with the generating of the money in the first place, so it makes
more sense to keep it offshore than to bring it to the US.

~~~
yfufuffuc
This would be sensible if profits were being paid in each country. The double
Irish functions to siphon profits from Europe and Asia to tax havens like
Burmuda. This is a world wide scandal.

~~~
ringaroundthetx
Income taxes are a 100 year old concept in the western world, capital taxes
are an even newer concept.

The moral arguments to support them are even younger.

And these guys are the scandal?

I'm not suggesting there is no abuse happening here, or that its so binary as
one side is morally good and the other side is morally bad, I'm just offering
perspective to the limitation of your argument.

------
porter
You also never hear about breach of fiduciary duty by the trustees. This
happens all the time in the U.S. and it's difficult to catch because it's all
private. This is particularly true for the elderly.

I wouldn't want to rely on offshore laws to enforce trustee fraud.

------
troydavis
This article claims to give specifics, but carefully omits that all legal ways
to transfer money from a trust to a US individual will require the individual
pay taxes on it. The offshore trust only serves to defer taxes, not avoid
them, unless the money remains outside the US permanently.

The US's tax policy is to tax income when it's brought into the country. One
can debate the pros and cons of that policy, but it was a very intentional
choice. Calling compliance with that law "avoiding taxes" is like calling an
average American who deducts mortgage interest a "tax avoider": they're
complying with the letter and the spirit of the tax law. Its implementors
considered the pros and cons and decided that, on balance, the mortgage
interest deduction made sense. Someone who isn't paying taxes they don't owe
is not a "tax avoider."

As an example, this article's sole proposed way to get the cash from a trust
is patently illegal:

> When your Uncle Joe dies, the insurer pays. The cash goes into your bank
> account tax-free. How can the taxman prove otherwise? You have a policy and
> Uncle Joe’s valid death certificate issued by your own government. The money
> is home free.

… which they gloss over with:

> If the phony insurance policy is too gruesome for you, you can find
> something more appealing in the summaries of the multitude of methods on the
> IRS website. A simple workaround would be to get a credit card from a
> foreign bank and pay it off through your secret bank account.

This isn't "a simple workaround," it's a recipe for getting prosecuted for tax
fraud – and quite possibly going jail, since it would be clear that this was
intentional fraud.

For a few perspectives that cover the issue better, start here:

* [https://www.irs.gov/businesses/income-from-abroad-is-taxable](https://www.irs.gov/businesses/income-from-abroad-is-taxable) (the IRS's own statement on hiding income offshore). "In addition to reporting your worldwide income, you must also report on your U.S. tax return whether you have any foreign bank or investment accounts." This isn't some theoretical risk; if, or more likely when, this account gets discovered, they'll be prosecuted.

* [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/offshore-tax-havens...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/offshore-tax-havens.html?_r=0) (look for examples how someone can actually get the money into the US without paying taxes; you won't find many, if any)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversy) and [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/swiss-to-let-banks-lift-secrecy...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/swiss-to-let-banks-lift-secrecy-in-us-tax-deal/) (2013; history of US pressure on the last few countries that are or were part of the worldwide banking system but didn't disclose transactions)

* [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-08/proxy-fig...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-08/proxy-fights-and-mystery-trusts) \- Matt Levine's summary (quoting the FT): "Otherwise, the Paradise Papers seem to be 'dull reading,' and they describe plans that are 'mostly, if not totally, legal' \-- 'Some are not even questionable from a legitimacy point of view.'

This sentence of the NYT article a good summary of the US's tax policy:

> “I would have told the guy, ‘You’ve got this money offshore — just leave it
> offshore,’” Mr. Pfeifer said. “And he did.”

Again, there are pros and cons to that policy, but this article doesn't try to
point those out, it tries to paint people complying with the letter and spirit
of the tax law as unethical.

~~~
the_watcher
There was also this one:

> For a modest 22% commission, the service will deliver suitcases of cash to
> New York or Vancouver. Guaranteed.

Given that the author leads with how the superwealthy aren't paying the 20-30%
tax rate that he claims the average tax payer does, it seems weird to call a
22% service fee an effective avoidance mechanism.

~~~
makapuf
Suitcases of cash are often used for not so legal money (drugs, arms) for
which the main issue can be anonymous transfers, not taxes.

~~~
gozur88
Yeah, the big problem for people using a service like that isn't that they
have to pay tax. It's that they can't say where the money came from.

Still, I find it kind of odd it costs so much. I though Hawala banks transfer
money for just a few percentage points.

------
jondubois
What really annoys me is the slope of taxation in most developed countries and
how it just suddenly stops going up after your salary exceeds around $150K.

If you earn less than $10K, you pay 0%; that makes sense, then if you earn
$150K, you pay close to 50%... OK you could argue that this still makes sense.
But then if you earn $200 million per year, you still only pay 50% tax - This
makes no sense; the tax rate should follow a Lorenz curve which mirrors and
offsets income inequality.

To earn $100K+ as a professional using nothing but your brain is bastard-hard.
It takes a toll mentally.

Someone who owns stocks and is earning $500K+ per year from dividend payments
while sitting around in their underwear all day doing nothing should be taxed
at a much higher rate than someone who earns $150K by mutilating their brain
every day. That seems extremely obvious to me.

The most infuriating thing about the current tax system is that the magical
$150K number (where the tax rate suddenly levels off) is in fact the exact
point after which earning money starts to get easier. This is exactly the
point when the tax rates should start really sloping up - Not the point where
they should level off!

Also, I think that the argument about protecting rich people so that they can
have extra money to invest back in the economy is no longer valid. With
innovations in crowd funding, large numbers of people can now easily pool
their resources together to fund very significant and meaningful projects.
Rich people these days are only interested in monopolising markets; not adding
value.

~~~
projectramo
I agree with some of the general sentiment here but what I don't understand is
why how hard one works or how much toll it takes should have anything to do
with taxation.

For instance, suppose you're a happy go lucky guy who doesn't need much sleep
and have a happy home life, and I am a grumpy dude who hates everyone around
me and hate my co-workers.

Should I pay less in tax?

Tax policy should be based on our collective values regarding such things as
what incentives we want and to what extent we want redistribution. It should
not be related to punishing people who are enjoying their lives.

~~~
jondubois
In my books, money that you get from dividend or rent payments is not 'earned
income'.

I don't think it should be classified as income; it should get its own
category and be taxed much higher. We don't want to encourage people to sit
around and do nothing just because they happened to decide to buy a few Apple
or Amazon shares 20 years ago.

Maybe the tax rate would be correlated to happiness, but that's OK; maybe it
will average out the human experience... That seems fair.

~~~
troydavis
> We don't want to encourage people to sit around and do nothing just because
> they happened to decide to buy a few Apple or Amazon shares 20 years ago.

That’s an inaccurate summary of the current consensus about capital gains tax
policy. The logic for a lower capital gains rate is:

* people with capital should be incentivized to do something with it (other than put it in a mattress, ie, in cash/money markets)

* the person with capital probably has relatively limited ways to deploy it themselves. Someone with a retirement account probably can’t, and usually shouldn’t, take that $50,000 and start a business with it (even though that income would generate compensation for them, which you’d propose taxing at a lower rate). At the other extreme, someone with a huge business would have reinvested the profits into the huge business (instead of taking a distribution and trying to invest it) if they thought that was the most productive use of the capital

* given that not all holders of capital can deploy it productively themselves, and that we don’t want them to sit on it (or deploy it poorly because they’d pay higher taxes if they didn’t), the next best thing is to encourage them to provide that capital to others.

Experts argue how much lower the capital gains rate should be, or even that
capital gains and income should be taxed equally, but basically no experts[1]
argue for a higher rate, nor that a lower or equal rate encourages “people to
sit around.” Of course, there’s a chance that you and, say, 1% of mainstream
economists are on to something.

[1]: Don’t trust me; form your own opinion:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=does+anyone+argue+that+capit...](https://www.google.com/search?q=does+anyone+argue+that+capital+gains+tax+should+be+higher+than+income)

~~~
dragonwriter
> The logic for a lower capital gains rate is

We don't actually have a lower capital gains rate, we have a lower _long term_
capital gains rate, which, insofar as it has logic beyond “its the kind of
income that predominates among the superrich”, seems to be loosely grounded in
the fact that income earned over a period greater than one year would be
overtaxed if treated as simole current-year income in a progressive tax
system.

Of course, a simple solution to this is simply to tax long-term gains as
income but allow either advanced or deferred (or both) recognition of income,
regardless of source, with some defined quantitative limits.

------
xefer
I wonder if it would be possible to create a business whose purpose is to
create tax shelters from money pooled together by tax payers who would
otherwise not have enough individually to take advantage of these strategies
available to the rich?

------
Shivetya
Tax rates need to more reasonable to encourage the rich to pay them without
question. When rates get to high the first hint is that they stop earning and
spending where that holds true. A business doesn't always have the same
opportunity because they tend to want to sell everywhere.

The idea is to get them to spend freely and the trick is finding the
breakpoint that changes the behavior. there will always be countries welcoming
the rich and as luxuries become more available in more areas this will only
increase.

so find the balance

~~~
omegaworks
>Tax rates need to more reasonable to encourage the rich to pay them without
question.

How does this not lead us to a race-to-the-bottom? If any reasonable person
had the discretion, they'd pay as little tax as possible. Many of the
"wealthiest" Americans play the "Declare Declining Real-Estate Value as a
Loss" game to avoid paying tax altogether. [1]

There is no lower limit that people will simply pay without question. You can
always frame even a minuscule percentage-based tax as a problem given a large
enough income by looking at the absolute values paid. That this is given as a
rationale for lowering tax is pure propaganda.

1\. [https://www.thenation.com/article/without-the-amt-donald-
tru...](https://www.thenation.com/article/without-the-amt-donald-
trumps-2005-tax-rate-would-have-been-just-3-percent/)

~~~
cjlars
If you have a a 50% tax rate and can cut 10% off your tax bill with fancy
accounting, your after tax income rises 10% to 55% of earnings. If you have a
10% tax rate and can cut 10% off your tax bill with fancy accounting, your
after tax bill rises just over 1% to 91% of earnings. Decisions are made at
the margin -- How much effort does it take to keep the extra cash and how much
do you get to keep? high rates make tax evasion, legal or not, more
worthwhile.

~~~
omegaworks
Then it's a plain cost-benefit analysis.

What you're missing are the three factors at play in cost:

1\. The tax rate itself

2\. The cost of avoiding it

3\. The cost of getting caught

We have control of 1 and 3 _not just 1_ , and we can exert influence on 2. The
double-Irish hole is closing.

~~~
cjlars
Who said anything about cost of getting caught? Tax avoidance is expressly
defined as taking advantage of the legal options. There are a huge amount of
loopholes out there, and a huge amount of effort goes into manufacturing legal
ways to qualify for them. The overwhelming bulk of that effort is deadweight
loss.

------
RoutinePlayer
Do some of the comments here further highlight that money is the true religion
in the US and the world?

------
ciconia
> Of course, everybody hates paying taxes.

I don't.

------
dexterdog
If you believe that taxation is theft then what is morally wrong with doing
everything within the law (and withoutince it is written by those whose
primary interest is in maximizing state income) to counter that theft as much
as possible?

~~~
alex_duf
But why would you believe taxation is theft?

~~~
snappyTertle
If you believe you own your body and the labor you produce, why would anyone
else (including the state) have a right to your body's production?

People say "social contract". When did we opt in, and can we opt out? It's
being enforced without consent. We pay for things we don't want. Whether this
be never ending wars around the world, or the welfare state such as the ponzi
scheme known as social security.

~~~
notduncansmith
Sorry, but you can't really exist here without benefitting from thousands of
years of human effort offered up to you by our ancestors. Your ideas, your
choices, your work, everything that you might consider a part of you, is a
natural consequence of exposing the same basic machinery to a some combination
of pre-existing material.

You are an emergent phenomenon - to claim "ownership" of anything is pure
hubris, and reflects a dangerously limited understanding of causality.

~~~
snappyTertle
I agree, voluntary interaction between each other is what creates wealth. Not
the shuffling of stuff from one group of people to another.

------
jnordwick
Getting bored of naked politics on HN.

Can we have a special politics section so we can keep it separate? I guarantee
I'm not the only one who thinks it is becoming disruptive to the technical,
scientific, and business side of the site.

~~~
sp332
This site is all about politics. Free speech, open internet, regulation of
large corporations, venture capital and small businesses and how health care
and taxes and incentives affect them, housing crises in our various backyards
- it has a deep and immediate connection to the "technical, scientific, and
business" topics.

~~~
Fnoord
Not only that, all those topics you mentioned are related to technology.
They're deeply intertwined. That happened the moment technology became ever
more important in our lives.

The people who only want to discuss, for example, Android from technical
merits and completely leave out any privacy aspect are the ones who have an
agenda. They're trying to silence our concerns. We should downvote their
opinion as its akin to complains about moderation.

~~~
quotemstr
Political totalism is itself a political position --- a bad and exhausting one
that turns communities into ideological battlegrounds.

It should be obvious that we can have a conversation about, say, the Android
low memory killer's process ordering strategy without having to talk about the
social implications of website cookie tracking or whatever.

Yes, mobile technology _as a whole_ is connected to privacy. That doesn't mean
that any particular detail of that technology is relevant to any particular
political cause, and it doesn't give people the right to inject social issues
into discussions into technical matters. You can't be intellectually honest,
keep a straight face, and claim that malloc chunking is "deeply intertwined"
with some pet political cause.

One reason the West has gone mad the past few years is this bizarre emphasis
on the old, bad "the personal is the political" idea. No, it isn't.

~~~
sp332
It seems like politics is elbowing its way into tech and entrepreneurship. I
mean I wish people didn't have to worry about upcoming healthcare legislation
when considering launching a new small business. But it's hard to talk about
Apple as a company without mentioning the huge amount of money it's holding
offshore. Tax policy has become a stand-out feature of big tech companies.

------
watty
Guidelines for submission:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon..."

Since the rich avoiding taxes isn't some new phenomenon, this is off-topic.

~~~
kbenson
> Since the rich avoiding taxes isn't some new phenomenon, this is off-topic.

The actual mechanics of how it is accomplished being published is a fairly new
phenomenon, to my eyes. That makes it somewhat relevant.

~~~
watty
That's kind of silly. Every single thing that happens in politics is "new" at
one point, so therefore we should be able to post every new political thing?

~~~
kbenson
That has little or no relation to what I said. The publishing of how something
is done with specifics when that process was largely hidden previously makes
this interesting.

Your inability to see it as anything but purely political is not an attribute
we share.

~~~
watty
What do you mean by "largely hidden"? Nothing in this blog post is hidden or
secret.

~~~
kbenson
My argument is that the process by which money is moved to these tax lenient
locations and the companies that facilitate this and the options and services
they offer has to this point been largely unknown to the average person, and
is thus interesting to read about. Are you contending that all this was known,
or that even if it was unknown it's uninteresting? Because otherwise I'm not
sure what you're arguing.

------
PatientTrades
The amount of loop holes and workarounds that our tax system allows is
ridiculous. Maybe we should move to a tiered flat tax system No deducations,
No credits to eliminate as much grey areas as possible.

~~~
gozur88
Flat tax systems sound good in theory, but they don't address the problem,
which is _what counts as income_.

~~~
a_c_s
Yeah, I think we need to flatten them a different way: tax corporations and
individuals on a percentage of revenue (income) they earn.

Then it becomes very expensive to create a shell company to launder money
through and games like paying oneself through a corporation lose their appeal.

~~~
gozur88
It also becomes impossible to make low margin products, which would pretty
much wreck the economy.

