| > I can quote tax laws as counterexample. A rule like "you pay 2% of your revenue as a tax" is simple and pretty hard to abuse. Well, for one such a policy would bankrupt many people and companies and be bad long term. Eg, anybody living month to month with effectively nothing to spare would end up slowly losing everything. And of course companies would work around that by making things not be revenue. Eg, instead a company just paying you $X, now you get a whole bunch of "free benefits". You live in company-provided housing and eat company-provided food, which doesn't count as revenue. So rather than earning $1000 and paying $200 rent, you now earn $800 and pay no rent. Government now can't tax that $200 because it's not revenue. You just live in a house provided as a free perk by your job. Next step is that the government notices and doesn't like it, so now there's an extra tax if you live in company-provided housing until you end up paying roughly the same amount of tax as before. It doesn't matter how you cut it, anything "simple" will be worked around, the government will try to counteract it, and we've come full circle again. |