Hacker News Reader

Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

Do you think tax laws are effectively enforced today? The main argument for simplifying the tax code (in any way) is that it will limit the effectiveness of games and loopholes.

Are you arguing that the complexity of the tax code makes it more impervious to cheating?

View on HN

I'm arguing what I wrote, which is that if there were a single big tax rather than a lot of small ones, people's efforts to avoid it would tend to produce more dramatic distortions in how we live. I wasn't saying anything one way or the other about the effectiveness of such a tax as a way of collecting revenue, or how effective current taxes are at that.

Sigh. I wonder if forums train one to write verbosely. When I say exactly what I mean, and no more, I always seem to end up having to produce the macroexpansion of it in the grandchild. I wonder if one eventually starts to anticipate this.

You wrote that weird distortions were a possibility, and I agree, but do you also think they'd be more dramatic than the ones which exist today? We have some big taxes on productive activity and a lot of small taxes to go along with them. All of these already produce distortions in how we live.

Indeed. It would be nice if you could mark a post as "don't extrapolate on what I've written." Just a little social cue to potentail respondents that they should check their rebuttal to ensure that the point they're refuting is actually contained in the text of the original. Like this:

  But if they did actually clone genetically engineered dinosaurs from mosquito DNA, 
  I'd prefer they did it on an island well off the mainland to ensure that
  they couldn't escape and endanger the population at large.

  /noextrapolate

Who's the "they" now, the cloners or the cloned?

I think you shouldn't be surprised that when you say "people will game the system" the assumed critique is that people won't pay taxes. Again, who cares if some people moves to the sticks? The revenue side is all that really matters in your scenario.

I think a pithy comment is still a good idea :)

I see now that you were making a point about the distribution of economic incentives that result from tax policy.

Ideally, we'd all devote consistently high-quality attention to both reading and writing on hacker news. I don't always do that, in part because of 'forum training,' and in part because I hardly ever respond to comments unless I'm procrastinating, and thus 'in a hurry.'

Can we address the problem by extending the language? Another poster mentioned a /noextrapolate tag.

What about qualitative metadata, to indicate how carefully one should read the comment?

We could end our comments with a comment character in a representative language.

  ;  means "brief"
  #  means "pretty normal"
  // means "I am (tired || pained 
  //              || procrastinating worse than usual)"

Now, let's see if it works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com