You're the one that brought up a comically inflated 70% number as if it were realistic. You can't act as if the nominal rate is the effective rate, then complain when I bring up numbers based on the effective rate.

> If you're using them, it means the state failed to provide you with proper education and health services, forcing you to spend money on things that are theoretically your constitutional rights.

No, it means I'm picky about my doctors. You seem to have ignored the tax-advantaged retirements accounts, though.

> These deductions aren't automatic either, you have to spend time and effort accounting for all of this so that you can make the government give back some of the money it took from you. Time is money, so this is just yet another stealthy tax.

You just need to ask for receipts and put them in a (digital) folder. Then you spend 5 minutes tops _per *year*_ reporting their sums on your tax forms. If that's not enough, most of the numbers are pre-filled for you, you just have to review it. And you can download past receipts from the federal government's website.

> I know for a fact that the US does, and european countries almost certainly do too. Accounting for these will probably only make Brazil look even worse by comparison.

Then do it. Tax legislation is very different across countries and even municipalities. Comparing nominal tax rates is completely meaningless. You need to compare the effective tax rate.

> If you want a computer that can properly run LLMs locally, you're going to be forced to shell out money in the 40-100kBRL range. Computers are in the same price range as cars now.

What part of that is due to an increase in taxes? Hardware prices have skyrocketed around the world due to limited supply. In fact, there's a record high number of computer hardware parts in the most recent list of products exempt of import taxes.

> If we keep up these nonsense taxes, AI will be just yet another area where Brazil is half a century behind.

Our government is doing exactly that. The latest project in discussion in the Senate will give import tax exemptions and export tax exemptions to data center projects that reserve 10% capacity to the national market, invest 2% locally in R&D, and use clean energy. I think these numbers are ridiculously small.

If we had lower import taxes on data center hardware, how else would the government negotiate with data center companies to reserve capacity for our national interests?

Finally, I think it's a bit silly to think that _you and me_ running agentic coding LLMs at home furthers national interests. It does not. It furthers our hobbies. It's not even the kind of hobby that gives you relevant career experience which then goes on to strengthen our industry.

> The same time period that birthed Lua, in fact.

Lua was created in 1993 in a lab doing research for Petrobrás. I happened to graduate from PUC-Rio, so I know this personally: the Computer Science labs are receiving much more funding nowadays than they did in 1993. They're still cranking out excellent research, and, if I may say so myself, excellent alumni as well.

> What have we been doing since then? Nothing.

- Our electronic voting system; - Pix, the largest and most popular payment network in the world; - Elixir, LangFlow, Neovim, just to name a few that you probably know about.

I'm not doing anything creative accounting-wise, I just max out my contributions to retirement accounts (PGBL) and get the correct tax deductions for all medical and education expenses.

We do have high import tariffs for individuals, and especially for consumer goods, as it's been pointed out in a different comment.

This does make it a very expensive country indeed if you want to live your life worshiping consumerism. But if you don't, you'll find that individuals don't really pay that much compared to other countries.