Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

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>Germany is the second to last country for IM apps usage in EU, with a mere 60%

That's mostly due to German older generations being tech-illiterate and skewing the statistics, like the boomer politicians who want to have their internet "printed", and my 50 year old ex-manager who refused to use Jira and had me send him a weekly email with the tasks in progress and their status.

On the other side of the spectrum, if you look at Germans under 30-35 they're all super connected via privacy shoddy apps like Telegram.

>Cash is still king

>[...]if you ever being to Berlin, and you want to go to a restaurant, you better bring cash. No body accepts cards or electronic payments there.

That's only due to rampant tax fraud in Germany's gastronomy sector and other small businesses.

So privacy there means privacy from the taxman, which is unfair for those who have to pay their fair share of (not small) taxes and support the burden of the social system.

> which is unfair for those who have to pay their fair share of taxes and support the burden of the social system.

You (as a government) want people to be honest with their taxes? Set up the taxation laws so that "being honest" is incredibly easy. Instead Germany has one of the most convoluted taxation laws in the world.

This alone should provide strong evidence that all the talk about "tax fraud" is just some pretense to adopt new surveillance laws and/or make them socially acceptable to adopt.

Something being difficult and complicated, like doing your taxes, is no excuse for braking the law. It's unfair that those with formal employment can't dodge taxes because they only get the NET amount in their bank account, and those with cash businesses can. Either legalize tax fraud for everyone or crack down on it for everyone.

Simplifying tax bureaucracy will not happen in Germany as it's the bread and butter of many companies who make their living on helping you deal with the complex system, and if the system were to be reformed, all these parasites would go bust. That aint gonna happen.

Another reason why it aint gonna happen is that it's what the majority of Germans voted for. They prefer having a system where that enables some businesses to dodge taxes masquerading as "privacy", so the politicians can't take this away and still expect to get reelected.

> Another reason why it aint gonna happen is that it's what the majority of Germans voted for.

In 2005, Angela Merkel (CDU) gave the campaign promise to simplify the taxation system immensely (using a system that the renowned export Paul Kirchhof (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kirchhof) developed). Independently, at the same time, Friedrich Merz, Merkel's "frenemy" at the CDU, independently made his own proposals to strongly simplify the taxation system ("Bierdeckelsteuer" [beer coaster tax]; meaning that for a typical citizen the whole tax declaration should fit on a beer coaster).

I know a lot of young people who voted for the CDU in the 2005 election exactly because of the ideas of Paul Kirchhof to simplify the taxation system despite otherwise not being attracted to the election goals of the CDU.

In 2005, the CDU became the strongest party in the German Federal Parliament. But Angela Merkel and the CDU broke this campaign promise. In other words: these politicians are nothing but mere fraudsters who deserve to rot in the jail for breaking such a campaign promise.

Thus: The problem is not that the Germans did not vote for this, but the problem is that the politicians are fraudsters breaking election promises and thus belong in jail instead of the parliament.

[citation needed]

Of course, there is no way to know exactly how much tax fraud there is, but it doesn't seem that tax fraud in Germany is particularly high: https://www.taxobservatory.eu/repository/estimating-internat...

>[citation needed]

No citation, just my anecdotal time working in the gastronomy sector as a student and that of several of my friends as well.

Seeing the owners at the end of the night carrying home buckets full of cash out of the restaurant that will never be seen in any tax declarations is a common sight, and will just be dumped into cars and real estate later.

This isn't restricted just to gastronomy and hospitality either. Lots of businesses deals in Germany are done on a handshake, with sums declared in the contract at, say 10k Euros, with the actual payment for the services being something like 50k Euros, meaning only 10k gets taxed, the rest is tax free for you. You get the point.

In case you're wondering why real este buying prices in Germany are so high and seem completely disconnected from the median wages, that's one of the reasons why. Lots of undeclared black money sloshing around the economy looking for a safe parking space.

>but it doesn't seem that tax fraud in Germany is particularly high

Meh, irrelevant. That statistics looks at offshore untaxed wealth. Most small business owners dealing in cash won't have accounts in Bermuda or Panama for that.

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