> I am going to refer to it as fraud, because that is the usual way the word is used in the context of the legal consequences one opens themselves up to making intentionally false claims about your residence in order to evade taxes.
> The law does not require anyone to pay taxes on unrealized gains of stocks, so no, it is not fraud if Buffett does not pay tax on unrealized gains of stocks.
You're not violating the technical aspect of the law anymore than Buffet would be. Can you tell me the proper amount of time someone must live somewhere in order for them to truly live there? Pass a law? Those won't work. Already people are doing this - what do you think people who are living in vans do? They claim residence somewhere, maybe their parent's house and then they just live in the van or maybe they have some other place they stay. People do this with Florida to evade New York City taxes, etc.
> I never wrote this, so I am not sure who you are responding to.
Just pre-empting a response. Long story short the first answer many have is legislation but it is too burdensome to address any actual issues.
> It is not hard if they are evading taxes by committing clear fraud with no plausible deniability, such as claiming they were physically in one place when in reality they were in another place. The news articles you see are for cases where there is a lot of gray area in the law.
I think you're operating in the current model but not thinking about what can and is likely to happen in the future. The U.S. already can't go after many people who are outright breaking the law. Once this reaches a critical mass it's basically like trying to stop people from pirating songs. It's just not going to work. The lion and ant thing is really great here to help visualize.
Also, who is to say where you really live? Ok maybe you do live with 14 other people in bunkbeds in San Francisco. Is (insert company) going to fly/drive/walk someone out there and show up and check on you? It's impossible to enforce. So you can definitely draw a Bay Area salary and effectively live somewhere else. You can even do it in other countries. Plenty of digital nomads. Have you ever heard of one being prosecuted?
> It is called freezing bank accounts. It is where much of the power of the US comes from, and many times why opposing entities who do not trust each other choose to do business in the US.
The dysfunction and instability of the stability of the U.S. democracy is eroding power like this, for better or worse. You can't freeze a Bitcoin address, etc.