It's important to remember that the loopholes are often intentional. They are left there so that rich people who can afford CPAs can take advantage of them, while middle income and poor people cannot afford to.

They are also left there so there is wiggle room for interpretation if it comes in front of an auditor or a judge.

And also, it's important to remember that in tax matters, the final arbiter of interpretation is a judge. Judges are humans, not machines. You can't "Trick" them by saying "well technically this is allowed!". Because they rule on the sprit of the law, not as it was written. Judges aren't amused when you try to be cute with how you interpret a law. And some Judges have biases, where you get a different ruling depending on if you play at their golf club or not.

Laws aren't computer code. They are vague on purpose.

I've heard this repeated a couple times here on HN. Do you have any citations for laws being vague on purpose? The whole point of laws, and the formal structure they take, is to reduce vagueness. Is this rock on person A's land or person B's land? When it turns out, despite best efforts, that a law is vague we even have a second system to step in and reduce the vagueness further: case law. I have no doubt that people are trying to exploit vagueness on both sides, but naysaying here is nonsense. And almost nobody wants law to be vague either.

> And also, it's important to remember that in tax matters, the final arbiter of interpretation is a judge. Judges are humans, not machines. You can't "Trick" them by saying "well technically this is allowed!". Because they rule on the sprit of the law, not as it was written. Judges aren't amused when you try to be cute with how you interpret a law. And some Judges have biases, where you get a different ruling depending on if you play at their golf club or not.

> Laws aren't computer code. They are vague on purpose.

Yes... but. Tax law is a bit different because it is similar to an equation: you put in your inputs and you get your outputs.

There have been famous cases where the courts have said in essence, "yes you completely and exactly and precisely followed the law, but we're not going to allow you to do that anyway." Those rulings have become less frequent.

This is ridiculous - first of all you don’t have to be rich to afford a CPA, second of all high earners almost always pay the highest rates (both effective and marginal). And even in the cases where they don’t pay huge marginal rates (dividends and LTCG), they don’t need a CPA to take advantage of that because it’s dead simple.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

> Because they rule on the sprit of the law, not as it was written.

I feel like this attitude is responsible for the modern destruction of the rule of law.

It doesn't matter what the law says, the only thing that matters is vibes! And whether you play golf with the right government officials.

> You can't "Trick" them by saying "well technically this is allowed!".

The obvious problem being that sometimes it is allowed. And then do you want that being decided by democratically elected representatives and specified ahead of time so the public can know what's expected of them and of others, or decided ex post facto on the basis of feels and discrimination?

> Because they rule on the sprit of the law, not as it was written.

Extremely funny to say that about US law when it is entirely based on precedent, and a single judge having vibes on a particular day changes how your entire country works for the next 50 years.

US law is explicitly made to be skirted, as is every common law system in the world and they are all irrevocably flawed.