The parent raises a good point though: Tax law is extremely complex when it doesn't need to be. The only justification for this complexity (that I could come up with) is exactly that it's complex to enable tax evasion/tax burden minimization.
Partly, but partly its just that all regulatory frameworks naturally tend toward complexity.
First, the legislature often decides that raising or lowering specific taxes is a good way to encourage some behavior or other (i.e. mortgage tax deductions or extra taxes on cigarettes). Most of these are actually pretty justifiable individually, but eventually you end up with too many exceptions and special cases for any nonspecialist to keep them all in their head.
Second, there's a huge body of caselaw and regulatory rulings that crop up around the actual tax code. Dozens of courts somewhat haphazardly decide that this weird edge case counts as income, but that weird case doesn't. Again, almost all of these are pretty reasonable taken in isolation, but you end up with a swiss cheese of arbitrary and contradictory rules.
Finally, wealthy entities will inevitably try to game the system. They will try to find a few well-intentioned but poorly thought out edge cases and alter their finances to try and intentionally fit a huge percentage of their income into them. By the time this happens, it's often very difficult to fix without hurting the innocent bystanders that the edge cases were put in place for in the first place.
Wealthy individuals and companies do lobby for favorable tax provisions, and politicians do sometimes pass laws specifically to benefit those entities. But the reality isn't that simple. International tax law is an emergent phenomenon, and it's really only going to bend to systemic incentive changes.
Average voters are too dumb and uneducated to appreciate that complexity or the effects it has. People who do would rather participate in that tax scam.
The reason politics is full of vapid stupidity is that powerful entities want it that way. If the population wasn't distracted by guns, abortion, and gay sex they might actually be paying attention to issues that matter.
Agreed. If we are going to tax corporations then why not a flat tax on the gross revenues. In the U.S a 3% tax rate on gross is the approximate revenue the IRS currently collects. Pass the expense to your customer if you are in a low margin business.
A business can't tell their landlord that they owe no rent because they are "unprofitable" ? Why then do we accept this excuse from the businesses who benefit the most from our public systems.
Because we want to allow specialization to increase efficiency. Rather than the nail company selling its nails to hardware stores and the screw company selling its screws to hardware stores, it's more efficient if they both sell to a supplier that can then sell to stores - it means only O(N) rather than O(N*M) different relationships to maintain, and the nail manufacturer can concentrate on its core competency of making nails rather than having to employ a bunch of people who know how to get their products in stores.
