Bulgaria tax hacking: An entire nation was hit

>But there are worse issues here, for example: corruption, stealing of European and government funds, oligarchic control of the power, etc.

Ah, the Eastern Europe usual problems...

Bulgaria underground economy was the highest of the EU27. Is it possible that low/high taxes has no correlation with tax evasion?

A good tax office, effective laws and public awareness seems more important than how high or low are taxes.

I only found data from 2012: http://jalac.kyxar.fr/ANG/ECONOIR11.html

> The taxes are pretty low - 10% on pretty much everything

And about 20% on national insurance. And 20% VAT. Not that low.

Exactly! The biggest differences between developed countries and the developing one is not IMO how much regulatory capture and corruption, its only in the scale. And in the developed counties the scale is often so big, its too big to fail.

I would say that the only difference is due process

But having operated in many “corrupt countries” now, I would say that the only difference is due process that you respect

From our perspective we will never respect how Bulgaria cronyism works, and Bulgarians will never respect how American cronyism works

We’ll call ours due process and imagine Bulgarians are sliding money under tables to get anything done, and they’ll flat out call the outcomes of our system corruption as well

(But there are a lot of favors happening outside of the legal framework too)

The difference is people are indirectly benefiting in developed countries so actual infrastructure gets built with government funds. In developing nations frequently so much is directly skimmed that the project never does whatever it was supposed to do.

It’s the difference between inefficiency and direct theft.

Oh wee lamb. Americans just have no idea about the scale of corruption in other countries. The kind of thing you mentioned has always existed in America. I was just reading an article about how they constructed MD450 in Maryland in the 1920s (a highway from DC to Annapolis). There was already a perfectly good mostly concrete paved road between DC and Annapolis (MD214/Central Avenue) at the time, a few miles south of the intended route for MD450. But some of the politicians involved owned land in the northern part of the affected counties, and insisted that a duplicative northern route be built. In the end the highway was obsolete almost soon as it was built, and the John Hansen Highway (now US50) was constructed to interstate freeway standards just a couple of decades later. At the end of the day, this sort of thing is bad but not fatal. It's usually a matter of politicians finding some benefit in a project or policy that can be justified for objective reasons. (E.g. whatever you think about our communications policies, for example, they're supported by a large amount of academic research, and served as the model for regulatory reforms in Europe in the 1990s and 2000s.)

The corruption outside of places like the US is of a completely different sort. It's straight up stealing and bribery. Worse, it infects larger segments of the society and government. At the end of the day, it's not really a big deal if a highway is redundantly built a few miles north of an existing one. But lower-level government workers asking for bribes to do their jobs, widespread tax evasion among ordinary people--that stuff isn't just wasteful, it's fatal to the ability of the country to function. It's basic math--there's relatively few elite, and some corruption at the top doesn't add up to much in terms of the overall economy. But when corruption trickles down to the middle class, it's infected the bulk of your economy.

Isn’t corruption basically legal in the US under the name of lobbying?

All the PACs and Super PACs that donate endless money, without divulging origin to candidates, so that they’ll push through their agenda?

Like where’s the fiber broadband the government paid billions for to the telecoms?

Hint: it’s not binary.

Granted, he said very important data.

Nearly everyone save for a tiny minority overestimates what can reasonably be kept safe. A good rule of thumb is that if the data exists, it will leak.

> I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of US SSNs have already been compromised...

We’re way past that, there have been multiple individual incidents that have exposed a majority of US SSNs.

> In modern democracies, this is not just theory. Ignoring a court's order is virtually unheard of.

This might be true for the older/western democracies. Sadly this is not the case in Easter Europe. As we say in Bulgaria - the law is a door in a field. You can go around if you want.

With the fine going where?

Probably to general treasury; which the tax office is essentially free to withdraw from.