Now sometimes you have tax laws that are poorly designed, where we don't like what happens when people follow the incentives they create. Or other times you have tax laws where people debated about what things to incentivize, and one side won the debate, and you might be on the other side. It's perfectly fair to want to change them. But it doesn't really make sense to criticize people for responding to incentives per se.
You're even more culpable if it is later discovered that you lobbied for the loophole.
Society's reaction should be to disseminate the surprising story and use it to drum up support to fix the law. At that point, the only reason to not pursue the matter further is to serve the higher principle of avoiding ex post facto legislation. It's an important principle, so we allow the crime to go unpunished, but the morality of the situation is still that the theft was wrong.
But overall you can't really stop anyone doing almost anything. If people don't want large companies to pay taxes, or favor property values instead of building more housing, or reward working in finance instead of engineering so be it. Just don't come and complain a few decades later when everyone is greedy and things are falling apart. Because if moving money around is the way to make money successful companies are going to be just as good at that as anything else.
In this exact scenario, people complain all the time. They start talking about how we need to raise other taxes to make up for the new shortfall in cigarette-related revenue.
Ah yes a terrible example for the argument you're trying to make. In NYC bodega's sell cigarette "illegally" imported from VA. It doesn't and hasn't stopped people from smoking, at all. It's a vanity bill. Also, it helps generate revenue because most people from outside of the city won't have a bodega that will sell them untaxed cigs, which is always the easiest way to pass taxes, have a non-local pay them. Does government run lotto help stop gambling? No, they just want a piece of the pie.
In general, the average income tax law (the basic stuff) isn't poorly designed, its just under enforced and the extra tax law makes the rest very difficult to work with. Right now, what is poorly designed in tax code is the effect of increased globalization, software and international tax treaties/law. a Also, not paying your taxes when you're using government benefits should be criticized, 100%. For example, Walmart formerly not paying a living wage and making the tax payers support some of their employees, while the founders kids are all billionaires, is totally broken.
The whole "nudge" practice because nosy people want to decide what's best for others drives me nuts.
in some sense tax havens are kind of like black market banks
Complain about the law.
E: CogitoCogito is absolutely right, there are companies spending lots of money around the world to push these regulations. I just seriously doubt that Activision Blizzard is one of these.
> Complain about the law.
Do you not suppose that these large corporations with so much money at stake do not in fact use their resources to ensure that laws take their current form? Do believe they are somehow innocent actors in this drama?
> The problem isn't with the corporations...
Are you saying that _none_ of the corporations with large money at stake are taking the financially rational approach of influencing the current state of the laws to have these "loopholes" or are you just saying that Activision Blizzard hasn't done so. If you're saying the latter, maybe you should edit the post I responded to to make that clear.
Edit: Small edits fixing terrible writing.
E: I edited my prior comment.
It’s easy to think only those people you disagree with are lobbyists, but even just sending a letter to your congressional representative is lobbying. And there are paid lobbyists on both sides of almost every issue.
So called grass roots lobbying generally involves well funded groups organizing or convincing individuals to do the talking. Pretending that’s somehow different from paid lobbyists is missing how politics works.
Companies and Unions for example are often at odds on specific issues, but they both get sincere individuals to be doing some of the communication.
Otherwise there is (or at least should be) no difference.
FTFY
But with the high cost of being elected, of course politicans follow the money and the corruption that goes with it.
Most people attempt to fill out their returns in a rather straightforward manner as laid out by the forms. The loopholes are not published in the tax forms.
Did you put money in a 401k?
Did you buy a house and calculate the tax deduction?
Did you hold onto a stock so you’d get the lower long term capital gains rate?
Did you contribute to an HSA or FSA?
The majority of people make decisions that optimize their tax rate.
Have an FSA or HSA?
You can cherry pick my examples.
Not by a long shot.
You are being dishonest in discourse to use that word with different definitions depending on who you apply it to. Either regular people are minimizing taxes when they use rules to reduce taxes, and thus so are corporations. Or neither regular people nor corporations are minimizing taxes because neither has achieved the absolute minimum.
It's still perfectly legal to destroy the environment in many ways, it doesn't mean we can't complain about it.
If we don't talk about it, nothing happens.