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mrtksn | on: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
Does it? How many people skipped getting rich because they could have been richer? Any factual examples?

BTW, rich don't actually pay much taxes. The luxury life they live is usually not taxed, most of the things they do is considered business expense.

When a worker flies to Ibiza they first pay social security and income taxes, then they pay consumption taxes like VAT.

When a businessman flies to Ibiza they deduct whatever they can as an expense so they don't pay income tax and VAT. For whatever they can't claim that it is a business expense they will pay with a cheap loan against their assets and avoid paying income taxes. Since they still have those assents, they pay just the interest later when the assents increase in value. If their business fails those assets fail, the bank takes the assets and no taxation happens.

paganel | parent
What the OP is trying to say is that to grow from 50k euros earned per year to 1 million euros earned per year is very, very cumbersome and, yes, mentally challenging and very stressful, and that a lot of people actively choose to stay/remain at the 50k euros per year level and they'll not take the risks of trying to get to more than 1 million per year.

Once you're at more than 1 million per year there are other challenges and you can probably afford to hire someone to take part of that burden off your shoulders, but until you get to that point you're on your own and it's very damn stressful (and by stressful I mean that that includes the possible inflated but all to real fear of getting to prison because of that tax-thingie that you didn't fill the 100% correct way or because some work your company did broke some municipal regulations or whatever and now you're on the hook for damages and, yes, personal liability).

Actually your VAT-skimming thing at the end is a very good example of that mentality, i.e. the innovators here having to have the Tax man front and center in their minds, before innovation and trying to build something useful off the ground, because if you don't know how to play the Tax man (at the limit of legality, as your example is) then you're toast. That "playing the Tax-man" thing consumes a lot of people's energy in the early stages, energy that would have been way better spent trying to actually make something new and innovative.

[the 50k and 1 million figures are just used as examples, maybe it's not 50k but 70k or 80k and maybe it's not 1 million but 5 to 10 million, but the idea stays the same]

brewdad | root | parent
Those problems are universal. Or do you honestly think that American startups don't need to hire an accountant and consult with lawyers? You either find the risk/reward proposition worthwhile or you don't. There's nothing wrong with not pursuing the riskier avenue but don't pretend the US makes it easy.
paganel | root | parent
There are levels and levels of enforcement, and, yes, from the across the pond it does look like the IRS is not breathing as menacingly each and every time you may want to do something different.

For example a company like Uber could have never taken off here in Europe because the tax authorities (and not only) would have never let that happened, i.e. Uber (the company) playing the "they're not real employees" game with the authorities. Yes, Uber eventually made it into Europe, but only because by that time it already was a big and established company in the States so it had lots of money to spend on lobby activities.