[roenxi]

> "hide a land mine inside the law"

This isn't a great idea and there are things wrong with it at a couple of levels.

1) We do not want the government to be in an adversarial relationship with rich people. Most rich people maintain their riches by adding tremendous value to society. While they may be reticent to pay taxes, they are not enemies.

2) We do not want the government rules-lawyering the law. I'll risk being opinionated and say that the law is not meant to contain random gotchas, it is supposed to codify usual and expected behaviour.

The law is meant primarily to be followed, not broken and enforced.

3) As sibling posts mention, people who change jurisdiction to avoid taxes are going to get an actual legal opinion and have sufficient influence to get the law changed. It'd never work in practice.

> "They say you can't cheat an honest man, but you sure can con a cheater."

Reminds me of the three felonies a day business [1]. We want less of that thinking, there are enough problems caused by unclear regulations without adding more on purpose.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438...

[ionised]

> Most rich people maintain their riches by adding tremendous value to society.

That's not the impression I'm getting.

[logfromblammo]

There is clear evidence of intent to cheat right there in the article.

1. The government already is an adversarial relationship. The theoretical purpose of it is to act as a cartel enforcer, to shift individual actors away from their selfish Nash equilibrium to a global-optimum that benefits all members in aggregate, albeit less than they might be able to achieve acting independently. I do not accept your premise that most rich people get richer by adding value to society. That stopped being even remotely plausible in the 1980s. While the existence of rich people can add value to a society, it does not necessarily follow--the rich person has to choose to add value. One in the article explicitly declares a moral imperative to pay the lowest amount of tax possible. Without any mention of charity or philanthropy, that person is not adding any value beyond what he spends directly.

2. The law is already rules-lawyering itself. It could simply say that any person who genuinely becomes a Puerto Rico person shall pay nothing for those four categories of tax. All those additional requirements are there because otherwise people would just declare on paper and reap the benefit without providing the actual stimulus the law sought to provide. Just as you don't write a contract expecting that all parties will always honor all their obligations, and you don't write code expecting that there will be no unexpected inputs, you can't write a law that pretends no one will break it. This particular law already has a lot of gotchas, because it is targeted specifically to a group with a known-high proportion of people who believe "little rules are for little people"--people with lawyers who explicitly advise them on how to make the rules not apply to them. A law that cannot be enforced when broken is no law at all.

3. Just because rich people are out of control does not mean it is useless to try to control them. If they change jurisdiction to avoid contributing to the society I participate in, they can sod right off and not come back. If they buy off my government, for their own benefit and to my detriment, they will eventually provoke backlash. Of all the crap we have seen in the last 2 years, the Trump tax cut is what made me angriest, and most willing to throw someone into the surf at the peak of high tide with a flotation device and a pair of flippers, and to erect a guillotine on the beach. We should never accede to government corruption just because humans are fallible, and corruption will always be possible.

The three felonies problem is essentially a matter of code cruft. The law has bloated up to uncountable millions of lines, and the technical debt in it is so overwhelming that refactoring isn't even possible any more. It's full of bugs, though generally referred to as loopholes within the domain. This makes it possible to sometimes defy the spirit of the law by following it to the letter. And this becomes an arms race whereby one loophole gets patched and creates multiple new loopholes in the process. People with a specific interest can always locate and exploit the loopholes can always find the new ones and use them before they get patched. Those who do follow the spirit of the law often don't even see the loopholes until they see someone else abusing one. Simply put, the laws are written for the cheaters. The cooperators already know how to cooperate.