Nearly 100% of large businesses use some form of tax shelter. There's nothing more wrong with that than using a coupon you clip from the newspaper, or looking for deductions on your income taxes at the end of the year.
If anything's wrong, it's the legislators that wrote the laws that they are working within to hold onto as much of their money as they can. If you don't like me using the coupon, you shouldn't have put it in the paper to begin with, or added some fine print to it to restrict my use of it.
Taxes are just a best-effort attempt to collect the funds necessary to pay for public services, the trick is there will never be a best way to determine what ratio to take from whom when trying to pay for the services that most of the people are using. And "everyone is always going to prefer that someone else pay more so they can pay less", and that's never going to change either.
I personally don't see why they don't just convert it to something besides currency, maybe precious metals. I suppose they do already, to a large extent. They invest heavily, preferably in something safe, but companies need to have some liquidity and for that they have to have cash on hand. I don't see how having cash (or property / assets for that matter) can have that great of an effect on one's use of public services. I don't require more water to my house or dog catchers on my block just because I have another million in the bank, so should I have to pay more taxes as a result? It's never made much sense to me. Seems to be based more on "those that have more should contribute more, even if they don't use more", and that can't seem fair at all from the "haves"'s perspective. There's a definite disparity of wealth though, I can see where people look at that as the counter-balance. But is it robbing Peter to pay Paul? Even if in the end the money is (however roundabouts) going to and from where it needs to be, the obvious path it takes nowadays doesn't seem to be very logical. Bit if it is doing the right thing for the wrong reason, won't cutting the tax shelters just move/change the problem, instead of solving it?
Looking a little deeper into the whole philosophy of the problem... a free market economy will always tend toward a disparity in wealth, driven by the population tending to be willing to pay slightly more than something is worth because they want it. Eventually wealth starts to pool, and pockets of poverty emerge. But that's not the fault of the wealthy, the others freely gave up their wealth a little at a time over the years, and they continue to use the public services. It could be argued that they should still be paying for their share of the services despite having less wealth simply because they were foolish enough to give some of their wealth away. If I'm poor but I spend my savings on a new $1,000 iPhone, and now I can't pay my utilities, does that mean Apple should help me pay my electric bill? That's kind of how I see the problem. The population created the disparity of wealth (and benefited from it in the process) and now looks at things like raising taxes and removing tax shelters as the response to the disparity of wealth, where they will again benefit from it. Comments?
