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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

> I would guess it's all legal.

When it's all secret, we can't make an informed decision on whether or not it should be legal.

What's secret? Income and capital gains brackets are public knowledge. Is who has the money really that important? If you think income over 100,000 should be taxed higher, you can already use the current brackets as reference(and compare to what other countries use, for example).

The tax laws are public, but it's hard for most of us to understand how those laws apply in practice to people whose taxes are radically more complicated than most, and are prepared by the best tax experts money can buy. We also don't know the inputs. I think there is public interest in seeing how the tax code works in practice. I'd wager the results are a lot of different than the average person naively assumes.

> What's secret? Income and capital gains brackets are public knowledge.

That you are speaking about income and capital gains brackets indicates that you don't actually know how the rich hide their money from the tax man.

It, at a first approximation, gets laundered through foundations and into trusts, that they retain control of, but don't really pay either set of taxes on.

Publicly release your own tax return first then. Be the change you want to see.

Nothing interesting in them. Wage income, standard deductions, some realized cap losses from a few stock sales. Looks like any other tax return.

What bit of information do you expect that tax return add to the conversation of "Are the rich evading taxes?"

We have a whole section of the government dedicated to figuring out whether people are evading taxes and then pursuing them for it. It could use some more funding, but that’s the appropriate way to do it.

What are you going to add by having uninformed members of the public inspecting tax returns they don’t understand? Keep in mind there are people who turn down raises because they think being in a higher tax bracket will cause them to lose money. These are the geniuses you want to catch tax evaders?

> What are you going to add by having uninformed members of the public inspecting tax returns they don’t understand?

Nobody's saying these people are illegaly evading taxes. The question is: "Should what they are doing be legal?". And that is absolutely a question for a layman. That's what representative democracy is all about. We get to collectively decide what is appropriate, and inappropriate in our society.

Enforcement of the rules is for an unelected executive and judiciary, with limited public input. Determining the rules is for an elected legislature, with significant public input.

There is no government department responsible for determining whether or not the current tax code is fair. We, the public, get to decide that.

Ok, the question you proposed to answer in your previous comment was “Are the rich evading taxes?” which I took to mean the public should be assessing the current legality of what individual rich people are doing.

Various tax strategies can be and are made public without needing to dox anyone. We are currently debating about them right now. So what do we gain by opening up everyone to identity theft and fraud?

As a point of order "we" don't make these decisions at all. We elect people who do. And, you can support something being legal/illegal on principle alone.

It's hard to argue for legal changes, when you can't even describe the problem.

Bill says "The rich should pay more taxes".

Bob says "No, they shouldn't, they pay plenty."

Neither actually has any idea of how much in taxes the rich actually pay. You can't have an informed discussion in that situation.

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