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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

> caused by loopholes and "incentives" for the upper 0.1%

You'd be amazed at how most of this sort of thing is not done by the same people you blame for everything.

Yeah. My impression is, small players exploit the loopholes like there's no tomorrow, big players hire external consultants to give them least-effort playbook and take over liability, as anything more clever is exponentially more expensive.

One of the funniest ideas I heard was that we in South Asia do corruption properly, because unlike the West, even the poorest person gets to be corrupt while in the West you have to have money and know people. Democracy!

It's just not true at all though, and I don't get where the meme comes from other than the politicians pointing their fingers at the rich so we don't look at them. If there wasn't incentive to be homeless, we wouldn't have so many.

> If there wasn't incentive to be homeless, we wouldn't have so many

/s? There isn’t an incentive to be a war refugee either.

How is creating your own ETFs to avoid paying taxes low effort?

I mean, it's very low effort to have somebody else do all the work. But you'll never see a self-employed electrician creating an account in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes.

You'll see a load of people on benefits being tax-negative, though. If paying taxes is your measure, then an honest assessment of who pays taxes wouldn't land you at the ultra-rich.

Self-employed electricians don't have enough money to need Cayman Islands accounts (many software engineers on FAANG salaries, on the other hand, do, and plenty are already experts in "corporate" tax optimization). Self-employed electricians instead do half their work for cash, and procure materials from untaxed sources.

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