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Italian here, the reason behind this is that Italy is full of small enterprises, mon and pop shops, ... and until the end of the '90s tax evasion was so rampant

Italian here, the reason behind this is that Italy is full of small enterprises, mon and pop shops, ... and until the end of the '90s tax evasion was so rampant that those shops and small companies have basically never paid a single lira in taxes. The people owning those shops are a core block behind the Italian right. Shopkeepers in Italy are accustomed to dodging a certain percentage of VAT, and it all depends on people having cash at hand. When a society goes cashless, it's often a snowballing process, where people use cards more, and then withdraw less, so they have less cash at hand, and so on. If people stop carrying cash with them, it will become impossible for them to refuse card payments, and thus dodging VAT would become impossible.

squokko 4y ago
Sure, but cash is also an important privacy protection and if tax evasion is the cost then it's worth it. A society without cash is impossible to have true freedom of association.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- qalmakka 4y ago
  The point is, nobody gives a damn about that in Italy right now, except a very few number of people. Cash as a way of payment is accepted everywhere and is not threatened in any way, nor anyone has proposed to allow shops to refuse cash. This is a 100% for tax evasion reasons, and the "official" motivation is that "shop owned should not be forced to pay fees for card usage" - a very stupid reason, given that it is mandatory for the average person to receive his/her salary on a bank account. Most banks only allow you to withdraw cash for free on their ATMs, and extol a high fee otherwise (a fee that is several orders of magnitude higher than whatever a shopkeeper pays with SumUp or similar services). The point is simple: employees either don't vote for the right or they do vote for the right due to rampant misinformation about social issues (immigration! Europe! LGBT!). The Italian right is basically a well run scam, they blatantly lie to the public in order to be voted in, then they inevitably do some nasty stuff to help those they owe favours to, before getting inevitably shredded the next election. In Italy if you are a political party you only get ~3y to do your stuff before being destroyed in the next election, so most people in politics are just in for the short term.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  I suspect you live in a country where tax evasion is fairly low. Extremely high tax evasion (as in Greece around the financial crisis) can be absolutely debilitating for countries and their economies. Privacy doesn’t mean much when you have 40% unemployment and people can’t get jobs to feed their families.
  - knewter 4y ago
    Your contention is that high tax rates lead to low unemployment? I feel like this is an easy hypothesis to test with data.
    - oivey 4y ago
      No, GP is referencing the Greek financial collapse and accompanying austerity measures. They made no reference to the tax rate being high, and even if it was, tax evasion to get around that is unsupportable. I also highly doubt it’s an easy hypothesis to test. It’s not like you can set up an experiment. Good luck linking correlation to causation given the highly unique conditions in every country.
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    To be fair, the Greek government fleeced them first in the big scam, at an level non-previously seen before. The lack of trust is understandable.
    - ImpulseGuided 4y ago
      >the Greek government fleeced them first in the big scam For somebody who is not so familiar with Greek history: What are you referring to here? What was this scam you're speaking of?
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  Looking at Greece, I’d suggest that tax evasion is not worth it.
0x_rs 4y ago
This is diametrically opposed to everything the previous governments' had been trying to fight. It's an encouragement to evade taxes and a political move to appease voters and criminals. The annoyance of being refused payments with anything but cash with ridiculous claims such as POS being broken or whatnot, and not producing any receipt will come back for every law-abiding citizen, that will now be at fault for not possessing an "absolute" payment form, with this practice now being encouraged by the government itself, as up until now for the past few years you could simply leave if you were not allowed to pay with a card (thus making tax evasion much more difficult). I'm reading drivel about privacy in this thread. Nothing was stopping you from paying in paper money. This isn't a move to protect privacy (which the average person forfeits by carrying around always-connected devices anyway, just to mention one).
_Wintermute 4y ago
This is the same reason taxi drivers in London were so opposed to card readers being a requirement in London taxi cabs, followed by them always conveniently being "broken".

squokko 4y ago

Sure, but cash is also an important privacy protection and if tax evasion is the cost then it's worth it. A society without cash is impossible to have true freedom of association.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
qalmakka 4y ago
The point is, nobody gives a damn about that in Italy right now, except a very few number of people. Cash as a way of payment is accepted everywhere and is not threatened in any way, nor anyone has proposed to allow shops to refuse cash. This is a 100% for tax evasion reasons, and the "official" motivation is that "shop owned should not be forced to pay fees for card usage" - a very stupid reason, given that it is mandatory for the average person to receive his/her salary on a bank account. Most banks only allow you to withdraw cash for free on their ATMs, and extol a high fee otherwise (a fee that is several orders of magnitude higher than whatever a shopkeeper pays with SumUp or similar services). The point is simple: employees either don't vote for the right or they do vote for the right due to rampant misinformation about social issues (immigration! Europe! LGBT!). The Italian right is basically a well run scam, they blatantly lie to the public in order to be voted in, then they inevitably do some nasty stuff to help those they owe favours to, before getting inevitably shredded the next election. In Italy if you are a political party you only get ~3y to do your stuff before being destroyed in the next election, so most people in politics are just in for the short term.
rhaway84773 4y ago
I suspect you live in a country where tax evasion is fairly low. Extremely high tax evasion (as in Greece around the financial crisis) can be absolutely debilitating for countries and their economies. Privacy doesn’t mean much when you have 40% unemployment and people can’t get jobs to feed their families.
- knewter 4y ago
  Your contention is that high tax rates lead to low unemployment? I feel like this is an easy hypothesis to test with data.
  - oivey 4y ago
    No, GP is referencing the Greek financial collapse and accompanying austerity measures. They made no reference to the tax rate being high, and even if it was, tax evasion to get around that is unsupportable. I also highly doubt it’s an easy hypothesis to test. It’s not like you can set up an experiment. Good luck linking correlation to causation given the highly unique conditions in every country.
- pvaldes 4y ago
  To be fair, the Greek government fleeced them first in the big scam, at an level non-previously seen before. The lack of trust is understandable.
  - ImpulseGuided 4y ago
    >the Greek government fleeced them first in the big scam For somebody who is not so familiar with Greek history: What are you referring to here? What was this scam you're speaking of?
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
Looking at Greece, I’d suggest that tax evasion is not worth it.

0x_rs 4y ago

This is diametrically opposed to everything the previous governments' had been trying to fight. It's an encouragement to evade taxes and a political move to appease voters and criminals. The annoyance of being refused payments with anything but cash with ridiculous claims such as POS being broken or whatnot, and not producing any receipt will come back for every law-abiding citizen, that will now be at fault for not possessing an "absolute" payment form, with this practice now being encouraged by the government itself, as up until now for the past few years you could simply leave if you were not allowed to pay with a card (thus making tax evasion much more difficult). I'm reading drivel about privacy in this thread. Nothing was stopping you from paying in paper money. This isn't a move to protect privacy (which the average person forfeits by carrying around always-connected devices anyway, just to mention one).

_Wintermute 4y ago

This is the same reason taxi drivers in London were so opposed to card readers being a requirement in London taxi cabs, followed by them always conveniently being "broken".