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Comment by srk_hn | Hacker News Reader

Real question: Strictly speaking from a software engineering perspective, who cares? Why does a framework of taxes created by people who don't understand technology get to decide where I move around to?

I signed up for your job in a certain location and a certain date. That doesn't entitle you to keep track of where I am the rest of my life. As long as I'm able to be reached at the initially agreed upon location, regardless of how I maintain that communications channel, I never agreed to let you dictate where I live and move to and frankly nobody has that right.

Or is my body my choice just a convenient catchphrase for one topic only?

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Serious answer: Wherever you choose to live, you benefit directly or indirectly from services paid through taxes. Maybe your employer doesn't care where you live, but the jurisdiction where YOU are does care about where you work because you are being paid but you are not paying what others around you are paying to live there. This is a 3-sided relationship between you, your employer, and the civil society you live in and WFH in a different country is unfair to one side of that triangle.

How is that any different from the relationships between AirBnB/Uber and the respective authorities?

If you mean why Uber or AirBnB get to avoid paying taxes and you don't, they definitely are committing tax fraud: https://www.icij.org/investigations/uber-files/uber-tax-have... and https://www.passiveairbnb.com/airbnb-tax-evasion/

serious question: how is this different if you live in the city making X amount and then move to the suburbs where X is now supposedly 2X.

In my head we all pay the dues somewhere in some form to begin with - property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes etc.

It’s one thing if you’re avoiding paying those.

but how is it different that Twitter gets a tax write off to move to the Tenderloin. and if Joe/Jill chooses to move to the suburbs or temporarily move to Mexico while still paying state and federal income tax. sure there maybe some property tax loss but isn’t housing crisis already an issue? don’t company incorporate in Ireland to pay less tax?

In the US a majority of your taxes go to federal and state governments, whether you live in the city or the suburbs doesn't change where your taxes go and how much you're paying. The cost of living difference in that case is based on micro-economic supply and demand cost differences.

Companies moving to Ireland IMO are definitely exploiting tax loop holes and committing fraud. You and I and all of the countries devoid of tax revenue are hurt by companies benefiting from tax-avoidance loop holes.

California has already started to try to tax people leaving, if I remember correctly. Something about the value of investments sold afterwards that appreciated during their time in California.

It's only going to get worse as the differentials increase.

Countries have mechanisms to deal with this. VISA's, they can simply charge more for longer stay visa's. Would they capture all of potential value of those taxes? No. But they'd likely capture a decent amount of extra money which they otherwise wouldn't have got, while still restricting people from taking native jobs in their countries which is what the wider populace actually cares about.

Pretty sure some countries are doing this already.

Just to provide more info.

There's quite a few now, something like 33 countries with these visas. The terms tend to vary. I took advantage of the first one, the Barbados digital nomad visa which they created to work around the loss of tourism due to COVID. Since most taxes in Barbados are sales taxes and they have a peg to the US dollar it has worked well for them in terms of foreign currency reserves and supporting the tourist industry during the pandemic.

Other countries like Costa Rica require visa holders to pay local income tax which is fair enough while others don't or have a reduced rate.

I'm unsure of the overall morality of it but it can be done legally through the correct pathways as I have been doing.

I don't like that people will just do it on tourist visas instead though which I'd guess is the bulk of the objection to it.

I think most tourist visa's in most countries which are likely to have this issue are at most 3 months. If a country chooses to allow back to back tourist visa's like that then they sort of know what's going on and have accepted it as a net benefit overall. If they don't permit back to back then after 3 months you've got to up and move somewhere else which many people do, but realistically they're not that much different from a tourist in practical terms.

> Real question: Strictly speaking from a software engineering perspective, who cares? Why does a framework of taxes created by people who don't understand technology get to decide where I move around to?

Real answer: The "software engineering perspective" you have here is irrelevant to tax/immigration law. Taxation is based on where you live and work (physically). And countries very much get their say on whether or not they'll allow you to live there, for how long, and for what purposes.

You're missing the forest for the trees.

This isn't about an individual's right to free movement. It is about keeping employers honest about where their employees work and making sure they are paying their fair share of local taxes.

Groups of people put a strain on the local resources, we need those local taxes to fund those things.

If individuals were allowed to live somewhere and dodge the local taxes, every large company would use this to their advantage. Suddenly campuses of workers would all now be "remote" employees from their offices in some tax friendly area. This would put an undo strain on the local tax base who are now having to foot the tax bill for those not paying their share.

Well, you should care about it because laws apply to you whether you agree with them or not. So, at the end of the day both you and your employer will have to cover those costs. But nobody is preventing you from moving, you just might have to quit and look for a new job.

In theory I don't care where the bytes come from.

In reality, there are IP kind of laws, contract enforcement, taxes, time zones ...

Picture me this. Imagine You are a foreigner that has software engineering skills but not good enough (emphasis) to compete with the cream of the crop that commands high salary. I.e you are the bottom of the barrel. You can’t afford a property where you live. You can’t afford shit where you live because your society is expensive.

Then you have this bright idea of “oh let me go to another cheaper country and get the benefit of their cheaper society but still command high salary”.

And you still don’t want to pay tax in that country.

Foreigners like these need to be ban 10000%. Losers that can’t compete in their home country and still don’t want to pay taxes everywhere they live.

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