Nope, although the fake currency transfer rates that are the big obstacle here are structurally similar in their economic impact to prohibitively-high export tariffs, they aren't actually taxes; they don't go to the Treasury but to the Central Bank, and so they don't pay for social services but rather to subsidize imports, further hollowing out the Argentine economy and destroying our competitiveness. But the evidence suggests that, even if I'm willing to take the 38% haircut, TransferWise and PayPal simply don't work. They just don't have service here.
Argentina does have a little bit of income tax, which I'm not allowed to pay (I tried, but the tax office turned me away because they don't accept income taxes from illegal immigrants), but most of the tax revenue here comes from the VAT, which I pay just like everyone else, because it's included in the price of everything. Exports of information technology services, which is what I do, are exempt from VAT. In fact, when I had a company here, before I was an illegal immigrant, I had to pay a lot of extra VAT that was supposed to get refunded, but it never was, because following that aspect of the law is too inconvenient to the government. (Because all my revenue came from exports, you see.) One accountant suggested that I bill a friend's domestic company for fake services in order to get the refund. I refused.
(This may throw some light on why TransferWise and PayPal have opted out of doing business here.)
I understand that if you've lived in a country all your life with a more or less reasonable government, all of this sounds ridiculously implausible. Government economic policy optimized to destroy domestic industry at the expense of imports? Tax offices refusing to accept taxes? Tax offices breaking the law by refusing to refund VAT? Accountants recommending fraudulent invoices as standard business practice in order to work around the tax office breaking the law? And before I moved to Argentina, it would have sounded ridiculously implausible to me too. Maybe I would have assumed that people were only interested in Bitcoin for tax evasion, if it had existed then! Hopefully I wouldn't have been such a fool as to accuse random people on the internet of crimes as a result of my misconceptions, but I probably would have done that, too.
Anyway, that's the way things really are.
Dude.
Argentina does have a little bit of income tax, which I'm not allowed to pay (I tried, but the tax office turned me away because they don't accept income taxes from illegal immigrants), but most of the tax revenue here comes from the VAT, which I pay just like everyone else, because it's included in the price of everything. Exports of information technology services, which is what I do, are exempt from VAT. In fact, when I had a company here, before I was an illegal immigrant, I had to pay a lot of extra VAT that was supposed to get refunded, but it never was, because following that aspect of the law is too inconvenient to the government. (Because all my revenue came from exports, you see.) One accountant suggested that I bill a friend's domestic company for fake services in order to get the refund. I refused.
(This may throw some light on why TransferWise and PayPal have opted out of doing business here.)
I understand that if you've lived in a country all your life with a more or less reasonable government, all of this sounds ridiculously implausible. Government economic policy optimized to destroy domestic industry at the expense of imports? Tax offices refusing to accept taxes? Tax offices breaking the law by refusing to refund VAT? Accountants recommending fraudulent invoices as standard business practice in order to work around the tax office breaking the law? And before I moved to Argentina, it would have sounded ridiculously implausible to me too. Maybe I would have assumed that people were only interested in Bitcoin for tax evasion, if it had existed then! Hopefully I wouldn't have been such a fool as to accuse random people on the internet of crimes as a result of my misconceptions, but I probably would have done that, too.
Anyway, that's the way things really are.
Dude.