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Comment by martindelemotte | Hacker News Reader

My theory is that as a lot of people don't declare their full income in developing countries (and are quite tax-adverse due to a perception of high corruption), a way to redistribute is to tax "luxury" goods like vehicles or other visible stuff like the strata.

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As a Colombian I can say that most people declare full income due to fear of being chased by DIAN (colombian IRS) which is probable the most corrupt institution in the country, meaning that if you don't declare your full income they'll shake you down for everything you have, I've personally heard cases of people making innocent mistakes in taxes and getting extorted for millions upon millions by "honest DIAN officers".

The strata system was created to create a form of "equality" where rich people helped poor people via subsidies, however, this has been abused by both sides since the very beginning (poor people using 10 or 20x the normal amounts of water and electricity to "fuck the rich people" and rich people paying to get their houses declared "historical patrimony" to avoid paying subsidies)

In the end, the strata system was created for a different society that we have right now, nowadays almost all buildings are estrato 3 or 4 in areas where estrato 2 was the highest possible.

I have no idea what could replace the strata system (I'm not a political scientist or anything that resembles that) but I do agree that the system is broken and should be replaced by something better.

To eliminate the strata system we'd need to force everybody to report their incomes and expenses. And that's a huge amount of data to process, that's why the strata was devised. So yeah, we could, and should, but we won't.

How do the "honest DIAN officers" that you talk about report their exhorted income?

"Who taxes the taxmen?"

How about replacing it with nothing?

Works where I live.

No system of taxation?

If you can show us a modern functional large-scale (i.e. nation-sized) society that has no taxation, then I'd love to see how they do it.

I can't think of any examples, though, so would welcome your thoughts on this.

It's not necessarily tax evation though. There are really rich people who live in mansions in the rural area and pay 'estrato 1' prices for certain utilities because that's actually the infrastructure they're getting. So in order for this household to contribute to wealth redistribution, the property is assigned an 'estrato 6' despite paying really low prices for utilities.

This is very much true in Russia, where unemployed young people often ride A-class cars or own expensive flats. They are not taxed because their declared income is untaxed gifts. Taxes proportional to value of property balances theese extremes nicely. Unfortunately, not feasible in current russian political climate.

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