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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Europe
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Criminals make most of their money from drugs. And most law enforcement resources are allocated to fighting drugs.
It's our failed "war on drugs" that is creating a rich criminal class in society.
Legalize and regulate drugs, alcohol, prostitution and gambling and then there won't be a huge criminal economy. What remains can then be easily squashed by law enforcement.
I wasn't talking about war on drugs, those should be decriminalized anyway.
What I keep seeing in my personal life is car repair shops, medical professionals and other businesses that usually charge a lot and then take cash only. It's obvious why.
Tax evasion is a thing, yes. But it's also relatively easy to prosecute by auditing.
Money laundering requires a source of illegal money. And, what you may not realize, money laundering schemes always pay tax. They actually overpay taxes by faking non-existent economic activity in order to make the illegal money legal.
Take away the source of illegal money and money laundering disappears.
How are you going to audit cashless businesses that invoice one price and take another and how much is that going to cost? We're talking about likely widespread issue that needs solving systemically, not with adhoc actions.
Dude, tax collection has been optimized for hundreds of years before we even had electronic money.
They even got Al Capone.
Money laundering is the opposite of tax evasion. If you don't understand that those two things are not the same, then I can't really help you.
All of you guys focus on some billionaires, mafia bosses etc but we're talking about 3k/10k EUR limits.
I'm asking how do you audit cash-heavy businesses doing petty tax fraud cost effectively?
You weren't asking anything. You were just lumping things together.
To audit tax fraud, just audit the books. If a restaurant is full on a Friday night, but the books show few sales, then you have your evidence.
If someone buys a new car and has a nice house, but claims their business is hardly making profit, then the tax authority can demand they explain the source of their income.
Again, this is how they got Al Capone 100 years ago.
Money laundering is much more difficult and it's the opposite. Because the laundering restaurant can just write in the books that they sold 100 more cocktails on a Friday night, paid by cash. And they also pay the required tax on it.
To combat money laundering, you need to audit the customers of the establishment, which is why they want to reduce the usage of cash.
But instead of turning the EU into East Germany, we should just stop criminalizing vices and regulate that, which is the main source of dirty money.
Seems like your solution costs more than it brings to the budget and all that you're gaining is false sense of privacy.
I am not proposing any new solution. Tax collection agencies across the European Union already audit businesses and it's a revenue generating activity.
So you're fine with tax collection being ineffective, got it. All taxation is theft and so on, right?
Dude, I have talked to AI bots that are more intelligent than this
Tax collection is very effective. Extremely effective, even.
That's my whole point.
Belgium solved that last year by simply forcing all traders to accept electronic payment (in addition to cash). They cannot refuse electronic payment.
It's an EU-wide thing now I think. Our car shops just say they can lower the price significantly if you pay by cash. Others just play dumb.
Rightfully so. When telecoms and train travel vendors give discounts for paying online, it rewards consumers who are on the unethical side of the #warOnCash and rewards discrimination against the unbanked and punishes the poor. The elitist idea of discounting electronic payment harms everyone by promoting Bill Gates’ war on cash. Visa’s $10k incentive for merchants to refuse cash rewards the practice of excluding people and attacks privacy and autonomy. Whereas cash discounts encourage consumers to carry cash and to use it to support a system of inclusion, which is needed to show merchants on the edge of introducing exclusion that cash acceptance is important.
I think you're on some ideological crusade, I'm more into pragmatism.
Prices should be the same regardless of the payment method, but let's not pretend the "discount" you get when paying cash is anything but tax evasion.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
― Desmond Tutu
Let’s not pretend Visa, Mastercard, and American Express give free service to merchants. Let’s not pretend the costs of loss of business when a card fails, or the equipment malfunctions is zero. Let’s not pretend there is zero value in having cash to facilitate situations where wait staff shares their tips with the kitchen staff¹, or that having petty cash on-hand is not useful for small incidental costs. Let’s not pretend the transactions a company does is not sensitive information and that data brokers selling that info to competitors is free of detriment.
¹ I recently asked a restaurant for cash back. They said in principle they are willing to give cash back, but so few customers pay in cash that they often cannot share their (presumably electronic) tips with the kitchen staff. Their problem (as I see it) is they gave no incentive to pay with cash.
Cash has its benefits, I never said otherwise. But said benefits are for the individuals. Shops use it as an excuse to avoid paying taxes, and pricing differently is not noble at all.
You mention tipping, well good thing this is Europe then, where many places already did away with this stupid custom. Covid relief packages for restaurants in France were based on declared income. I'll let you guess why some owners complained they did not get enough help during the crisis.
I don't like that we have not found (or even looked for) a compromise in terms of privacy and safety between cash and cards, but I won't feel bad for hypocrites profiting from my tax money without giving their own share. 99% of people in Europe have never even had 3k worth of cash in their hands anyway
Nonsense. The benefits are for both sides of the transaction. I just listed several benefits to merchants - how did you miss that? If cash did not benefit merchants, there would be no reason for cash acceptance.
Not necessarily.
Of course it’s noble. They are proactively supporting the ethical side of the #warOnCash. The few businesses that offer cash discounts are practicing the ethical duty to protect cash by encouraging people to carry it and use it.
The example I gave of the waitress refusing cash back (because she needed it to tip the kitchen staff) was in Netherlands.
Tipping is actually increasing in Europe and it’s because of electronic payment that it’s happening. The payment terminals are coded to prompt payers to choose how much they would like to tip. So in Netherlands, you have a wait staff standing there in front of customers as they face this prompt. And the prompt is coded for US norms (10%, 15%, 20%). Customers feel awkward about refusing that prompt in front of the waitstaff, and of course the high percentages effectively mislead customers in Europe about local customs. In fact I have never seen a payment terminal in European restaurants that is coded for local norms (tipping €1 or €2 flat). They are always coded for US customs when they support tipping at all.
This swindle is not accidental. European restaurant owners are installing these kinds of terminals deliberately to stimulate high tip revenue so they have less pressure to pay high wages. The swindle would not be possible in a cash-based scenario.
I’m not sure I’ve seen a payment terminal where you can freely enter a tip amount. But certainly with cash, payers have full control and autonomy.
That’s fair enough. What’s your complaint?
You should feel guilty for the bogus assumption that everyone is a tax evader and then advocating for collateral damage to the people who are helping the fight against forced banking.
This is about the EU. Prostitution is not criminalized.