Sure, but those are relatively small potatoes.

And if a single person does it a lot, then the tax authorities can easily examine their spending and prove that they are spending more than they are officially earning. And then they can apply punitive measures.

You don’t understand. This is tech tribal war.

“Big Tech” is Apple, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta. Companies which were fully allied with the Democrats, and which were king of the tech hill until now.

Musk, Thiel and Ellison (Tesla, Palantir and Oracle) are allied with Trump. Lets call them “Tech B”.

Vance is doing code speak for: Tech B is gonna break Big Tech up and take top spot.

And Big Tech knows this, which is why they are scrambling to get into Trumps good graces and trying to get Trump on their side.

They have more money and influence right now and they are trying to leverage that to keep top spot.

And Trump is just letting the two teams bid up each other for his favour.

It is, but it’s also a very efficient and difficult to evade tax. For many EU countries the VAT revenue is equal or larger than the income tax revenue.

Most Europeans don’t mind it. You can control your spending, so VAT doesn’t hit us in inconvenient ways, like for example, taxes on cars and property.

European countries compensate poor people with good social programs. So in the end, poor people are getting more benefits than the VAT they pay.