> Presumably the content creators are paying taxes just like the rest of us
Correct. This content creator has also been a software engineer for 20 years. Paid a lot of taxes. Not sure why I'm supposed to owe anything to anyone.
>That seems like the flaw here, not the other thing. Why should the US government have any entitlement to tax activity that occurs entirely outside their jurisdiction?
Tax evasion doesn't cease to be tax evasion because you don't feel like you owe the government taxes.
> But I still call it tax evasion colloquially, because I'm just an average Joe who can't prosecute anyone so my legal opinion doesn't matter. My judgement is not whether it's illegal, but whether it's immoral and scummy.
Do you contribute to a 401(k)? Deduct home mortgage interest from your taxes? If so, you've participated in legal tax avoidance, too! I don't think either of those are scummy.
That's not how fraud works and that's not what the IRS is trying to do
Fraud: you have to knowingly misrepresent your position aka lie about something. Making a mistake on your taxes is not fraud (source - I am a US citizen and have received letters from the IRS for making a mistake). It is definitely not fraud to be caught in unexpected IP theft.
IRS: they are not trying to get people in "gotcha" situations. They just want to collect the fair amount of revenue that people owe the federal govt and their punishment is proportional.
>It is simply their desire now to not pay taxes, not pay their workers well, to clone 3rd party vendor's products under their own brands, to copy the occasional SaaS hosted on AWS etc.
It's "simply their desire" not to pay taxes? You think the IRS accepts that? Do you think they just write in "sry guys, we'd rather not pay"?
No, they aren't paying taxes on this money because it's offsetting prior losses. This is a perfectly reasonable way to structure the tax code, and it only seems like malfeasance to you because you haven't bothered to understand it.
> That they actually incurred the losses they claim to have incurred, so they get a tax break. The taxpayer is defrauded.
Did they not incur such losses? Did they claim to delete the movie but actually kept a backup? Granted, the loss is self-inflicted, but that's not a relevant factor in the tax code.
>Edit: are you really suggested that people like John Gotti and El Chapo declare income from criminal activities and detail how they made that once audited
No, I'm suggesting one of the examples used in your premise is wrong. The legality of income has nothing to do with paying your taxes from the IRS's perspective.
Except you did when you called them tax evaders.
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