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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Those schemes are also human-created though, and can be human-fixed. I've never really understood the arguments that go like: "This regulation won't work because the people it targets will avoid it through loopholes and other schemes." Well, get rid of the loopholes and schemes, then!

Granted, this requires lawmakers to explore more of the "exploit space" around their proposed regulations, but I don't think that's really asking a lot of them.

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The only way to get rid of tax avoidance is to simply tax transactions, every time, for every person, on every transaction.

“Oh, that’s regressive” they will say.

Make it small per transaction. A rich person spending 100x what a normal person spends will pay 100x as much tax. A billionaire spending 10000x what a normal person spends will pay 10000x as much. And they will also be taxed if they borrow money (that’s a transaction) against assets so they don’t have to sell them.

And when someone inherits, that’s also a transaction. Money moves from one person to another. So that same tax applies.

If your wealth/income increases x1000, their spending will not increase a thousand-fold. It's not like you can eat a thousand burgers in a day. All this leads to is poorer people paying a larger proportion of their income as taxes than the richer.

> And when someone inherits, that’s also a transaction. Money moves from one person to another. So that same tax applies.

This is a big one—we continually decrease the estate tax, which is already waived until you get to 'fuck-you-money' at the federal level (around $11 M)

Land value tax?

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