4 ms·

He's not saying break the law. Throwing waste in the countryside is both legally and morally indefensible. Lowering one's taxable income using legal means is

• coldtea 8y ago
  Either the law about tax is bad, so it should be repealed. Or the law is ok, and bypassing it with scheming is "morally indefensible", even if the schemes are legal.
  • jki275 8y ago
    Or the law is being strictly applied as it's written. If people don't like it, it can be changed through the legislative processes. You're using the word "bypass" as though it means to break the law. He's using it to mean that he's following the law strictly in order to pay less taxes. Those two interpretations are not compatible.
    • coldtea 8y ago
      Every law has a letter and a spirit. Assuming a law is morally correct, trying to find loopholes to legally bypass its spirit, makes you a jerk.
      • jki275 8y ago
        If the "spirit" of the law, is at odds with the letter of the law, and the letter of the law is an attempt to do things that are not constitutional, then it doesn't really matter what one calls someone over following the law.
        • coldtea 8y ago
          Not even sure what this means. The spirit of the law ("pay your tax to contribute to the country's budget") is not at odds with the letter. And neither is it unconstitutional.
          • jki275 8y ago
            "pay your tax to contribute to the country's budget" is a massive trivialization of the issue. Taxes are a highly complex system with thousands of rules on what is taxable and what is not, what income must be declared, what deductions are allowed, what investments count as pre-tax and what investments count as post-tax, etc etc etc. It's not "pay your tax", it's "follow a massive set of regulations that determine what taxes you owe and then pay those taxes". I assume you fill out your forms and take deductions that are appropriate as allowed by the law, right? If you do, you're violating the "spirit of the law" as you've stated it -- but no one believes that because it's a ridiculous position to take.
      • lmm 8y ago
        A lot of the time it's hard to see any other "spirit" to those "loopholes". The "oil depletion allowance" in the article is described as "Meant to give incentives to drill for oil" - isn't that exactly what it did? If I do the things that the government offers tax incentives for, so as to reduce my tax payments, isn't that exactly the point of those tax incentives? I have a tax-advantaged pension, tax-advantaged life insurance, and commute on a tax-advantaged bicycle. I believe all those things are in the spirit of my country's tax law - isn't the whole purpose of tax breaks on pension contributions to encourage people like me to put more money into their pensions? Similarly I have no idea what the spirit of a rule giving capital gains different tax treatment from regular income could be, if it isn't to encourage people to form companies and take dividend payments instead of getting paid normally. Why on earth that's something Congress would want to encourage, I can't imagine, but presumably they passed that law for a reason.
        • jki275 8y ago
          To answer your final question, I think that the intent is to stimulate long term investment (investments held over a year are taxed significantly lower than those held less than a year) -- this tends to boost the economy and grow businesses, which create more jobs etc. To the rest-- yes, that's how I see it as well.