> What if I told you the villains are the ones writing the insanely complex tax codes with endless exclusions, not the ones using them?

How do you figure? Every dollar a corporate tax accountant saves Walmart gets redirected from food stamps and building public transport to the yacht class.

> Why is it ok for me to write off some tax breaks the government gave me, but the corporate tax lawyer is evil?

Scale and intent.

> How do you figure? Every dollar a corporate tax accountant saves Walmart gets redirected from food stamps and building public transport to the yacht class.

This is a non-argument. You can use the exact same emotional pleading to claim that its not ethical for corporations to do anything except donate all of their profit to the government (by overpaying their taxes) because every dollar is going to "food stamps and public transport" instead of "the yacht class".

> Scale and intent.

Whether something is evil or not is scale-invariant, so that doesn't matter, and there's no difference in intent between an individual trying to reduce their taxes and a corporation - the intent for both is "give the government less money".

Unless you have actually logical arguments against it, I think that the GP was pretty clearly correct in claiming that the root cause is overly complicated tax codes. US tax rates are set by the government ostensibly acting on behalf of its citizens and setting a fair tax rate. Companies and individuals are not only allowed but expected to take advantage of clauses that work in their favor (assuming that they're not behaving dishonestly to do so) - otherwise there would be literally no reason for those clauses to exist in the first place (it's obviously insane to add a tax clause to give tax breaks to college students and then condemn/prosecute them when they try to use it), so it's pretty clearly not wrong to do so.

Given that it's not wrong to (honestly) minimize your taxes, and the fact that complicated tax codes give a unique advantage to those able to spend lots of time and money on them (the wealthy and large corporations), you'd have to be crazy to think that it's not the fault of the authors.

(not to mention that complicated tax codes reduce government transparency, which is, uh, a bad thing)

Btw, I actually do not believe that the majority of governments are evil in intent on tax law. I keep seeing instances where their intentions are clearly "good" but nobody seems to appreciate the true cost of complexity.

The metaphor for me is that you have a code base with 1000 contributors, minimal pr reviews, no integration testing at all, and lots of global state. It is spaghetti and nobody is incentivised to simplify it

Yeah, I don't really think that most of them are "evil" either - perhaps "careless in a way that harms people" - I'm just arguing that the root of the harm stems from the tax code itself and not people trying to work it.