Zack KanterVerified account

That’s an unfair leap, and I’m surprised you made it. Not everything that is immoral is illegal, and not everything that is illegal is immoral. What I’m saying is that when it comes to taxes, I struggle to clearly define “moral” in a way other than “legal.”

https://twitter.com/zackkanter/status/1139670890759806978?s=21 …

I think I probably misinterpreted your original tweet as implying that you thought there is no difference. Glad to hear that's not the case, and sorry for the misinterpretation.

Granted that there often is a difference between what's moral and what's legal, it seems quite reasonable that many people's morality suggests companies should pay more than the legal minimum.

I hear that. What I'm wondering is that if people are going to judge companies by a moral standard for taxes (above and beyond legal minimum), how would they go about designing a framework for determining what's moral and what isn't?

Yeah it seems to me that moral==legal when it comes to taxes, with considerations: (1) Companies lobby to change what's legal, and they could ask for things that are immoral (like skirting paying fees for damage they caused); (2) The law could be immoral, obv.

I think there's an implicit "don't push tax minimization to a comical extreme" too. Skip the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich even if it's technically legal.

Yeah, I think it's hard to find the right line there -- what's technically legal vs. actually legal mean. Like, lawmakers should be responsible for writing laws where you can do the right thing by just obeying the law, technically.