There are somewhere between 12-20 million illegals in the country, depending on whose numbers you look at. Deportations last year were about 400k. About 25k people illegally enter the country every month, so net deportations are less than 100k per year. Pretty close to zero compared to the size of the problem. Government may not be ignoring the problem entirely, but they're not solving it either. They pay enough attention to give the appearance of doing something, but what they do has very little effect.
Whoa.. you think he should be murdered for leaving the US? Who exactly is he being ungrateful too? The people who his taxes already support? You libs are seriously authoritarian.. What do you think the govt should do if they raise taxes and the rich decide to start leaving in droves? Maybe a 100% exit tax.. or stick them in camps maybe? have hit squads hunt them all over the world? You are a fucking ingrate.. this guy doesn't owe you, me, the federal govt, or anyone else anything if he decides not to live here. He paid his dues already.
It's funny that Schumer berates someone for wanting to get out from under the government's boot. According the Schumer, we should be happy that the government has it's boot on our neck and quit complaining, or worse, trying to do something about it like leaving the courntry.
No, I'm not advocating it. But other governments have dealt with capital flight much more harshly than this proposal. In my mind's eye I see a raging, teenager, "I made all this money MYSELF, without ANY of YOUR help", and slamming the door on his way out. Of course, it's not true, he made his money the same way the rest of us in business made it, making sales. Couldn't have done it without my customers. And, we pay our taxes.
He paid taxes throughout his life. He'll be paying an estimated 500 Million in exit taxes. That's not enough for you? What about all the jobs his company created? Still not enough, right? If he wants to live in Singapore, and open a bank account, most of those banks won't even deal with him because of the IRS hassles in reporting overseas bank accounts. If you ask me, he did a smart thing. I would have done it too if I could afford it. If I couldn't come back to the US? Big deal. So what. Typical liberal argument, wanting what isn't yours to begin with and jealous of the success someone else had. Sticking your hands into someone else's pocket because the policies you believe in are too expensive.
We all pay taxes our whole life. Many of us create jobs. It's not my call how much tax is enough, it's in the tax code.
Weak. This isn't the USSR. Taking 30% is outrageous and you know it. This country is "behaving stupidly" and you can expect to see many more productive people flee.
It is in the law, you are correct. And there are legal ways that many people and companies use to not abide by it. That is the law that Congress put in place. Congress shouldn't go making separate laws simply because "a big fish got away". What about all the companies that donate to Schumer's campaign funds - the same companies that use tax loopholes to get out of paying US taxes? Is Schumer going to go after them as well? I doubt it.
Now here's an immigrant who knows what he owes the good ole USA... What Saverin owes the US (Hint: Nearly Everything) By Farhad Manjoo, 12 May 2012 http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/12/what-eduardo-saverin-owes-america-hint-nearly-everything/ "When Eduardo Saverin was 13, his family discovered that his name had turned up on a list of victims to be kidnapped by Brazilian gangs. Saverinâs father was a wealthy businessman in São Paulo, and it was inevitable that heâd attract this kind of unwanted attention. Now the family had to make a permanent decision. They hastily arranged a move out of the country. And of all the places in the world they could move to, the Saverin family saw only one option. They took their talents to Miami. "Would it be too much to say that America saved Eduardo Saverin? Probably. Maybe thatâs just too overwrought. The Saverins were just another in a long line of immigrants whoâd come to America for the opportunity it affordsâthe opportunity, among other things, to not have to worry that your child will be kidnapped just because youâve become wealthy. "Just because his parents moved here doesnât mean Eduardo Saverin owes America anything, right? "Yet if you study the trajectory of Saverinâs lifeâthe path that took him from being an immigrant kid to a Harvard student to an instant billionaire to the subject of an Oscar-winning motion pictureâit emerges as a uniquely American story. At just about every step between his landing in Miami and his becoming a co-founder of Facebook, you find American institutions and inventions playing a significant part in his success. "Would Eduardo Saverin have been successful anywhere else? Maybe, but not as quickly, and not as spectacularly. It was only thanks to Americaâthanks to the American governmentâs direct and indirect investments in science and technology; thanks to the U.S. justice system; the relatively safe and fair investment climate made possible by that justice system; the education system that educated all of Facebookâs workers, and on and onâit was only thanks to all of this that you know anything at all about Eduardo Saverin today. "Now comes news that Saverin has decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship, most likely to avoid a large long-term tax bill on his winnings in the Facebook IPO. Saverin owns about 4 percent of Facebook stock. By renouncing his citizenship last fall, well in advance of the IPO, Saverin will pay an âexit taxâ on his assets as they were valued then. But heâll pay no tax on income derived from stock sales in the futureâthatâs because he now lives in Singapore, which has no capital gains tax. Itâs unclear how much this move will save him, since it depends on how Facebookâs stock performs. But letâs say the value of his stock doubles over the long run, from an estimated $3.8 billion now to around $8 billion. If that happens, he wonât pay any tax on the $4 billion increase in valueâwhich, at a 15 percent capital gains rate, will save him $600 million in taxes. "Is this fair? No. Itâs worse than that, though. Itâs ungrateful and itâs indecent. Saverinâs decision to decamp the U.S. suggests heâs got no idea how much America has helped him out. "So, to enlighten him, letâs list all the ways Eduardo Saverin has benefitted from America. First and most obviously, he lived a life of relative safety in Miami, something that wasnât guaranteed for him in Brazil. Second, also obvious: If Saverin hadnât come to America, he wouldnât have met Mark Zuckerberg, andânot to put too fine a point on itâif Saverin hadnât met Zuckerberg, Saverin wouldnât be Saverin. "Third: Harvard. Zuckerberg and his cofounders met in the dorms, and while Harvard is a nominally private institution, it enjoys significant funding and protections from the government. In 2011, Harvard received $686 million, about 18 percent of its operating revenue, from federal grants; thatâs almost as much as it received from student tuition. "Would Facebook have been founded without Harvard? Perhapsâmaybe Facebook would have come about wherever Zuck went to school. Still, there were social networks at lots of other schools. There was clearly something about Harvardâs student body that was receptive to Facebook. "More generally, elite, government-sponsored American universities like Harvard have been instrumental in the founding of many tech giants. Microsoftâs founders met at Harvard. Yahoo and Googleâs founders met at Stanford. But even if you believe that these universities shouldnât claim credit for the companies they brought about, itâs still hard to argue that Facebook would be where it is today without the American taxpayersâ large investment in public education. Facebook depends on really smart people to make its products. You donât get smart people without tax dollars. "Fourth: The American governmentâs creation of the Internet. The strangest thing about Silicon Valleyâs libertarian politics is how few people here recognize how the Internet came about. ARPANET, the earliest large-scale computer network that morphed into the Internet, was funded by the U.S. Defense Department, as was the research into fundamental technologies like packet switching and TCP/IP. Delve deeper into the network and you get to the microprocessors that run the worldâs computersâanother technology that wouldnât have come about by loads of federal research grants. "Even the Web itself can trace its founding to government grants. Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN, the research group funded by Europeans governments, when he worked on the HTTP protocol. Marc Andreessen worked at National Center for Supercomputing Applicationsâwhich is funded by in a partnership between the federal government and the state of Illinoisâwhen he created the Mosaic Web browser. Then youâve got GPS, a technology that makes much of the mobile revolution possible, and one that is wholly created and operated by the U.S. government. "Fifth: The judicial system. If it werenât for the U.S. courts and laws, Saverin might have been permanently shut out of Facebook. But in 2009, he settled a lawsuit with Facebook that gave him credit as a co-founder and his current stake in the firm. In other words, itâs only because Saverin could sue Facebook and depend on a relatively fair judicial system that heâs got the billions on which heâs now skirting taxes. "Fair courts arenât to be taken for granted, by the way. There are many places in the world where, if you are wronged by a billionaire, you wouldnât be able to do anything about it. One of those places is Brazil; according to Transparency International, the courts in Saverinâs birth country are beset by corruption. "Now, none of this is to discount Saverinâs own contributions to Facebookâs success. Though he was only there at the beginningâand although he had some pretty terrible ideas for Facebook, including his plan to show interstitial ads when you went to add a friendâletâs assume that he did in fact add $4 billion of value to the world. "The question is, whatâs fair for him to keep? "As an immigrant myself, Iâve got no patience for the argument that he should keep all of it. Pretty much everything in my life that I enjoy wouldnât have happened without my being in the United States. My education, my job, my wife and family, the fact that Iâm not persecuted for my race or religion (I was born in South Africa), the fact that I can sometimes forget to lock my doors at night and not end up killed by marauding bandsâI hate paying taxes as much as the next guy, but when I think about all the ways that the United States has been integral to everything in my life, taxes seem like a tiny price. "Now, remember that the tax rate on long-term capital gains is only 15 percent. In other words, Saverin gets to keep 85 percent of everything heâs making from Facebookâs IPO. Given how much of his wealth depends on the government, thatâs more than fair."