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"The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be

• joshuamorton 6y ago
  From the ruling that the SC upheld: "To dodge the shareholders' taxes is not one of the transactions contemplated as corporate "reorganizations." And from the SC ruling: "The whole undertaking, though conducted according to the terms of [the statute], was in fact an elaborate and devious form of conveyance masquerading as a corporate reorganization, and nothing else. ... [T]he transaction upon its face lies outside the plain intent of the statute. To hold otherwise would be to exalt artifice above reality and to deprive the statutory provision in question of all serious purpose." If there's no business purpose beyond tax avoidance, the government can indeed hold you to the higher tax rate. I don't think that's what happened here, i think there are legitimate non-tax reasons for Uber/Lyft's structure, but it's not a completely unreasonable take to disagree with that. And even if not, the government is free to change the law to fix things, which it did.
• deleted 6y ago
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