Optimization of taxes is a constantly changing, narrow field of expertise - and the complexity of even "simple" tax systems is such that even a cheap, mediocre tax professional will usually save you more in taxes (compared to a "layman understanding" of taxes) than they cost. In this sense, no country is simple enough to operate without a tax advisor. In fact, in Israel where I now reside, it is effectively a requirement to have a CPA prepare and sign off your tax papers, even if your business did not have a single transaction that year. However, the reporting is simple (compared to the US, anyway) such that even if you had quite a bit of transactions, your advisor can finish it in an hour.

For similar complexity, I ended up paying my US tax advisor approximately twenty times as much as my Israeli one. I pay for quality in both places, and the hourly rate of the US CPA is approximately twice as much as the Israeli one (that's true in general comparing both markets). The US one just has about ten times as much work to do.

> Otherwise, the complexity of the system (which is not what I was talking about) isn't much of an issue.

I guess a tl;dr of my point would be: In most of the world, a reasonable course of action is to make plans for business purposes and then adjust them according to tax considerations, whereas in the US the reasonable course of action is to make plans based on legal&tax considerations and then adjust them for business purposes.

I agree that looking at the bottom line, it's just another business expense - I was just disagreeing with your assertion of a reasonable tax code. It is the case in the US (much more so than in Europe and other modern countries, in my experience) that where and how you incorporate, how you assign your IP, and how you time your transactions (short term/long term capital gains) can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Makes it much harder to reason about your actions, which is a non trivial (and hard to quantify) cost.