[bbzealot]

It's not really an arms race, it's more an inbalance between different categories of citizens.

Employees can hardly avoid taxes (as long as they're regular workers), while autonomous workers ("partita IVA") and small companies/entrepreneurs can easily avoid large amounts of taxes.

The latter are a huge source of votes especially for rightwing parties in Italy, so it's not uncommon for governments to make it easier to avoid taxes for them.

The current rightwing governemnt went as far as calling taxes "state's pizzo" (where "pizzo" is the payment Mafia asks for protection), it raised the limit for usage of cash, and it's discussing measures to forgive debt of tax evaders ("pace fiscale").

So no, it's not an arms race, it's just that it's convenient to let it happen for some political parties.

[inglor_cz]

In many countries of the EU, government expenditure exceeds 50 per cent of GDP, which seems to be the ceiling that average taxpayers can tolerate while still being able to pay for their own lives.

Italy is at 55 per cent. At this stage, you can't really expect people to be happy with the total tax burden.

[qwytw]

It depends on the services the state provides and the enterprises it owns (if it directly owns utility providers, some housing or even . A significant proportion of that 55% is used to pay salaries or for goods and services provided by other businesses.

e.g. France and Germany own ~11% of Airbus (in addition to many other companies) each, so 11% of their dividends go to the state (in addition to taxes) which gets to spend them increasing government expenditures to GDP ratio. Boeing OTH is entirely private owned which reduces the same ratio in the US.

[bbzealot]

How is this relevant to my comment?

As an Italian I agree that taxes are rather high, but enforcing them only on a subset of citizens while happily allowing another subset to easily avoid them is definitely not the solution.

I'd be much happier if the government enforced taxes for everyone, which would then allow it to either improve services or reduce taxes.

[qwytw]

It depends on the services the state provides and the enterprises it owns. A significant proportion of that 55% is used to pay salaries or for goods and services provided by other businesses.

[seec]

Yep, pretty much. Labour, aka real work is heavily taxed and then some people cry about the welfare recipients. Hilariously, in my experience they are the same people always crying and asking for more government intervention/help; especially when it can help them being less competitive and earn more for less. In my view this is just a mindset and a major reason I hate collectivism for most things. If you were to completely remove government taxation and welfare, they would soon complain about those people who make do with much less and thus have to work less to live decently. [My opinion being that it is clearly linked to the feminization of society where complaining gives better results than doing or becoming better.]

Which is why people are trying their luck at making money in ways that are less taxed and easier to evade taxation, like AirBnB. Of course, there are side effects, especially in this case considering the sad state of real-estate in most rich countries (boomer effect). In my experience there are fewer people willing to do real work in a standard heavily taxed contractual relationship (or work is done very slowly to maximize benefits). I believe the only ones not getting owned are the big companies who can afford big law departments to essentially avoid the tax burden as much as possible or shift it to someone else.

Now AirBnB should follow the law, but when you look at it, they became a de facto large tax collector for a state that does not have much relationship to them. It also seems that readers here are confused about what it means and why AirBnB is not very keen on complying. It is not about tax collection of AirBnB profits; they only charge a small fee for connecting renter to landlord and I believe they pay their taxes on that part. This is not about this type of taxation that is fair and square.

In the EU, companies must collect TVA on the final sale to the consumer. In AirBnB case, the only thing they sell is the connection part, platform access and some other tools. Nothing more. They are not the ones renting (selling the space for a determined amount of time) and they are not even setting the prices. What Italy wants is the TVA on that part, and the only reason that TVA is not collected in the first place is because those are from independent people cheating the government (very often boomers, who are the definition of this type of behavior BTW). If peoples renting their space on AirBnB would declare their renting income on their tax return there would be no need for AirBnB to collect anything.

Italy is essentially asking AirBnB to become a tax collector on their behalf under the excuse that they facilitate an activity where the citizens evade taxe in large volumes. I understand that they feel uneasy about this and in my opinion if they comply it sets a precedent where a government can have any large company doing its tax collection for free with zero scrutiny or recourse possible. While AirBnB is any easy target because they are so big and they essentially created this type of business opportunity if they comply it will eventually raise the prices across the board or send their users to smaller competing platforms, not big enough yet to be targeted by the Italian government. So they are in a situation where complying will have a very short term effect for the government but very real long term user loss for AirBnB, it just short termist stupid government thinking. The "news" is most likely part of the political propaganda.

If the Italian governement was operating in good faith, what they could/should ask to AirBnB is the revenue generated by each landlord and then figure out a way to match it to their tax returns and then go on and adjust the amount collected for those who lie (adjustment). That would be fair and could actually be required from every platform with similar model to AirBnB and it would make actual sense. Of course this is political propaganda and not what the government actually needs. As someone who sometimes help for some AirBnB operation I am absolutely certain most of them exist because of tax evasion. If you had taxes on to them, the price is too close to most hotels to make sense for most peoples. The hotel business is capital intensive but not that labour intensive unless you run a very high end operation. And this is exactly why AirBnB got so popular, peoples figured out that if they had the capital they could make a bit of money on the side on top of their regular income because it is not actually a lot of work. Blaming and requiring AirBnB to tax isn't going to make the problem go away, just displace it somewhere else.

In reality the Italian government already knows who own properties and who own more than is necessary compared to their life situation/income level. It would be very easy to raise taxe on those properties especially those of large landlords (that can only be if they make a business out of it). But they don't because it would require political courage. As many problems of today this is almost entirely a boomer problem, they are the ones with enough surplus money to finances properties or have supplementary space that can be rented. Sometimes I see jobs posting by those boomers for actually operating those AirBnB (it would be too much to ask of them to do some actual work for the profits), the jobs are very poorly paid and always require that it is an "independent". In other words, lowest pay possible with absolutely zero security; welcome to boomer world.

I really don't get the people here rallying against AirBnB, this is a political problem and it would just require some courage to go againts the boomers for once. There is a lot of money to collect there, and no need to have AirBnB involved.