Your argument is that high levels of fraud by international crime syndicates isn't the real problem, the problem is that we don't tax corporations enough to be able to withstand that fraud?
When you profile code, do you spend your time fixing the most resource-intensive function or the function whose name you don’t like?
Maybe you disagree with the suggestion that there are way, way bigger fish to fry, and we should prioritize our limited resources accordingly. But to say that it’s “completely ridiculous?” That’s a little over the top.
In your analogy your implication would be that the software engineer should spend their effort in the corporate boardroom arguing for changes in product requirements rather than in fixing bugs in the current product.
The requirements are fine, the requirements are to pay 20% tax on your profits.
The bug is in the code, the interface with international trade. It's allowing many orders of magnitude more tax to disappear than the pesky unemployment fraud code.
So no, I think his analogy is solid, the requirements are clear, the implementation is at fault.
For fucks sake one is breaking the law. Corporations are following the law. There is no requirement that corporations pay 20%, that is crap you made up.
The law is quite clear on fraud.
In the analogy the law is the requirements, enforcement is the implementation. You don’t like the requirements, sure. The implementation is still broken because it doesn’t address the fraud. It can’t do anything about the requirements because those are outside the scope of things that can be changed by the implementor.
The analogy is absolutely shit because it presumes the same actor writing the code can change the requirements, which is not true in software engineering nor in the US government.
The money is taxed when individuals finally get it, assuming they are US residents or citizens and earn above the minimums required to pay taxes. Corporations don't need to pay taxes at all in theory; it just double-taxes the same income and leads to the govt adjusting rates accordingly to achieve the same outcome (e.g., avoid driving corporations overseas with an uncompetitive high tax regime, which the US currently has).
The GDP of the US last year was less than 21 trillion, and we're talking about fraud that's allegedly 400 billion. Ergo, we're talking about ~2% of GDP. That's not "chasing pennies."
To put that in different context, 400 Billion is about 4x as much as the federal government spends on education. It is about 15x what we spend on energy infrastructure.
400 billion is a 2% of GDP but >10% of the federal budget.
I'm sorry, that's completely ridiculous.