Via lrc.com comes an excellent bit of tax-day snark: “What Do We Do If the Rich Start to Leave?”
Good beginning of a good question. The writer, Bill Frezza, says, “500 American citizens and green card holders in the last quarter of 2009 said goodbye to America forever. Not many, but double the number of expatriations in all of 2008. Good riddance, other millionaires will take their place.”
He’s not real clear on what he means by the rich, or whether those 500 surrendered their citizenship or just slipped away, PT-fashion, to friendlier climes.* But it’s the thought that counts.
A way bigger question is how many of the potential rich, or the hard-working professionals, or the scientists, medical people, and folks out there on the cutting edge of technology are going to leave. Already a lot of America’s scientists and entrepreneurs are from other countries. They come here to get educated. They get their green cards and stay. One day, whether because of taxes, onerous regulations, or growing official xenophobia … they’ll quit staying.
Back in the 1970s, maybe 1980s, you used to hear the term “brain drain” a lot in news stories about the UK. They were rapidly losing their “best and brightest” to other, freer, less tax-heavy countries. Now you don’t hear the term any more, but look what the UK has become — a land of servility and surveillance. The brains have already done drained, leaving politicians, bureaucratic nannies, yobs, working-class immigrants, and the bowed and obedient “citizens” behind them
How many exits does it take for that to happen? How many departing thinkers and doers?
I don’t know. But it’s a question I’m sure we’ll need to contemplate soon enough.
You can call it “running away” all you want. I call it the same sort of grace that drove my original German ancestors here before the Revolution, the same sort of self-preservation that later drove my Scots-Irish and Irish ancestors to leave their homes. Doesn’t matter whether the motivations were religious and economic (as with those stubborn German dissenters) or adventurous and economic. Or just-plain economic.
I know, sometimes it’s worth standing against an evil tide. Sometimes it’s admirable. Sometimes, as with so many heroic gun-rights activists lately, you can actually — oh, my stars & garters! — push back and make progress. Sometimes, though, when things are so bad in so many ways and you don’t make a strategic retreat … well, you just end up like The Order of the Star.
Hm. How many of us are here, and how much more freedom did we have for a while, because somebody (or a lot of somebodies) ran away?
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* Technically, “going PT” would mean giving up U.S. citizenship, since the U.S. is one of the few nations that imposes income taxes on citizens who live outside the country. But that’s a step a lot of PTers have been reluctant to take.
There are other options.
How many of the “rich” will buy and hold significant amounts of gold and silver, which are quite difficult for governments to track and tax?
What happens when (not if) one of the several states decides enough is enough and secedes? The resident kleptocrats will certainly try to grab a share, but Mordor on the Potomac might find it quite difficult to collect for month, years, or ever again.
How many “rich” will move a chunk of their wealth overseas, all legal and reported as required, but where the local banks and laws grow ever less subservient to US government demands for information and money?
How many “rich” will just shrug and stop producing wealth, going into “early retirement” and no longer contributing their talents to our economy? Or simply taking a reduced income job that they can do in a few hours a week, and avoid all the hassles of being a productive citizen?
How many of those “rich” will just quit and start getting all the Medicare, Social Security, 2 years of unemployment payments, food stamps, and all of the other goodies that the 40% of those who don’t pay income tax get now?
There are as many options as there are creative, motivated people who are sick and tired of being screwed as a matter of Washington policy. That 1% of the population that pays 40% of the income taxes represents 3 million people. Many of them got their money the old fashioned way, by earning it. They are smart and creative. How many will sit still for ever rising taxes and increasingly vicious slander?
I don’t know how many, but its a lot, and the numbers are growing every day.
A lot of interesting material in the “PT theory” and at the Squidoo website. Thanks. (I kind of liked the “Personal Territory” tag myself; it could apply anywhere – in the U.S. or out of it.)
Random thoughts:
And then there are the non-rich, those who can make some of the same choices that -S suggests. That’s probably most of us reading this.
Recognizing when a ship is sinking, one wouldn’t hesitate to get in a lifeboat. To convince ourselves that we are not “citizens”, but happened to land in a geographical area that somebody else claims for itself, is somewhat more difficult.
But once that conviction is established, it becomes easier to make a decision based on what is best for our own “personal territory.” If there is no other country free enough or trustworthy enough to move to, then another state or region might serve. Those states that are nullifying might work, if one is willing to work to help the nullification. Or secession. Or fighting back, like the Free State Project.
Economics does seems to be the holdup. But if ‘global’ becomes a reality (and every country is fast connected these days), no country will be safe economically, all countries will ‘sink’ together. It might be as easy (or hard) to stay as it is to go.
We kind of already have a “brain drain” effect inside this country, because of universities pulling the best and brightest from all over the nation and turning them into leftists.
Claire – were your German ancestors religious dissenters or political dissenters?
Jim — a bit of both, I suspect. They came over in the same wave of emigration that brought the Quakers (from England) and the folks we now know as the Mennonites and Amish (from Germany). So religious dissenters, for sure. But in those days, weren’t the two types often found together, since religious dissenters also had to fight against state religion and the laws that enforced it? In any case, political agitation also seems to run down that branch of the family. The very first ancestor I know of on that side served time in prison during the Reformation for pitching a religious statue into a cesspit. (No more details than that, but it seems clear he first looted it from a church.) So religious or political, I come from a long line of troublemakers.
And that’s even before you get to the Irish side of the family …
May I ask why you ask? Do you also come from troublemakers? Or are you sui generis? 🙂
I would not worry too much about the millionaires running for the borders. You can not give credit to Congress for much, but when it comes to the money coming in they pay attention! Two years ago they passed a real nasty bill (http://www.withersworldwide.com/news-publications/324/exit-tax-u-s-expatriates-to-become-law.aspx) under the heading of Hero-this-or-that that “helps pay for our troops” (yeah sure). What it basically does is say if you want to turn in your passport and leave the US, don’t let the door hit you in the butt…..but before you go, why not let your good ‘Ole Uncle Sam take an inventory of all your worldly assets and then slap a tax on everything (its basically everything over and above $600K) as if all your assets fell from heaven (and you were not paying taxes on every cent along the way)….then you can go. If the super-rich leave, they will leave behind a big chunk of wealth at the border. In the post-Patriot Bill era, there is no safe way to get out and avoid the tax. If you own anything other than physical gold, the IRS knows. Trust me on this one, I have over a decade of banking in my not too recent past. There are no safe havens. On the bright side (since you were looking for a positive tone to the Blog) if you leave the US you can probably keep about 60% of your assets… which is about 60% more than those escaping Nazi Germany 🙂
One wonders exactly what type of exodus is being addressed here. Are we talking about fleeing for our lives, or fleeing for something else? Is the discussion about making a better life, or simply jumping from the frying pan and hoping to not land in the fire?
Frankly, it seems that if people truly wonder if their best chances lie elsewhere, then they will not ever answer this question until they go.
What I am seeing in this country is not a destruction of the rich, but a destruction of the middle and working classes.
Is it not patently absurd to believe that the government run by and staffed by the wealthy will do anything to hinder their amassing of even more wealth?
What about the statistic that points to our country as the leader among all post industrial nations in the gap between rich and poor? Does this sound like a country that is taxing the rich into leaving?
When the ancestors of most people here left Europe for the new world, it was to participate in a true migration. Individual hopes and dreams fueled them, but there was a much wider movement happening. Is there some movement happening today, some promised land for our dreams to take hold?
Or, is it merely a logical conclusion to individual whim, to take to the boat or plane and never look back?
Congress is all-HEART, right? 🙂
Somehow I missed hearing about this Heroes Earning Assistance and Relief Tax (HEART) law. But it applies only to “certain individuals” and under specific terms. Is it possible for the non-rich, and/or certain OTHER individuals, to leave under the radar, as HEART wouldn’t apply to them, and wouldn’t be worth pursuing by government?
At what point would it be feasible for a person (living quietly with gold, silver, or minimal dollars, working in and among the natives, with no trusts set up or no strings attached in the U.S.) to expect to be left alone?
Rural Mike, We seem to be always talking to each other; perhaps we each get the other thinking.
“Or, is it merely a logical conclusion to individual whim, to take to the boat or plane and never look back?”
I don’t think “whim” is the right word. We here (i.e. many who are responding to Claire’s blog at BHM) are *concerned* about many freedoms being taken away daily. If you substitute the word “concern” in place of “whim” in your sentence, you may better understand why many of us are, indeed, about ready to migrate elsewhere — either alone or in company; in a gulch or in a community of like-minded individuals; “hiding” in the U.S. or in another country.
We differentiate between government and country. The government is that which merely rules, while the country is a repository for the people who happen to live here. Nobody asks to be born, nobody can choose what color or sex he’s handed, or into what political situation he’s thrust. But the natural affinity for freedom (perhaps stronger in some than others; that possibility has occurred to me) — determining our own lifestyle, refusing to accept what we’re told without question, daring to honor our rights by defending them in any way possible — has led some (and increasingly, more) to reach another logical conclusion: nothing is left for us but “fight or flight.”
We are derided for either choice. If we fight, we are terrorists… traitors… the enemy; if we flight, we are unpatriotic… cowardly… another way of saying — “the enemy”.
H.L.Mencken said, “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
Many who talk of leaving are despairing for this country, what is was, what it should have been, what it is becoming — and especially despairing of their own power to stop it. The question then becomes “What to do?”
That is not an individual “whim”, but a frustrated cry for help. *Flight* is one option. Should we *fight* another revolution instead?
Claire – that’s a great bit about the ancestor tossing the religious statute.
Now I know the “Mennonite missing link” — everything fits together.
According to family lore, @ half the Bovards (slightly different spelling back then) in Paris perished in the St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre. Survivors reputedly fled to England in a row boat, though I wouldn’t bet my beer money on that story.
They later moved to Ireland. They were expelled from there because the Irish were prejudiced against horse thieves.
Pat,
No doubt many things in this country, including most of the so-called leadership, are absolutely insane.
Problem is, I don’t see anywhere else in the world where its any better.
The government and its cronies demonize anyone they deem as representing a threat to their power, and also beat up on people because their moment in power activates their bully instinct. Politicians, and their sycophants, like the geniuses at the Southern Poverty Law Center show very well when given the mic just how shallow and mediocre they really are.
Being disparaged by lightweights is unfortunately inevitable. Their tiny minds flame at the prospect of others being beyond their reach.
When the lackeys ape every little ripple in the pond, and point the finger and shout they think they are stirring public opinion, they think they are high and mighty, however the truth is that the people are seeing through their smokescreen of lies and propaganda.
Thus the central issue with Americans becoming fed up with living in a country that is being killed for the profit and power of the few.
Despair-hell yes, anyone who has lived and looked past their teevee, burger and shake knows despair.
We certainly need wide and sweeping change in this country, but the irony is that the very power structure that is killing America IS bringing change, just not the change that the country-or the land-or the people need.
I ask, do we really only have two alternatives, fight or flight?
Are there not a multitude of ways to resist?
Is it possible that through refusing to feed the Nightmare, that Nightmare looses its power?
What if the big secret is not DOING something, but following the Heart? I mean, in a place ruined by decades of corrupt depraved rapists posing as leaders, what other practical alternative truly awaits us?
We are in a time where it is being demanded of us to dig deeper, to discover and implement more, not less of our character. How does hopping on the plane or ship accomplish this task?
“I ask, do we really only have two alternatives, fight or flight?
Are there not a multitude of ways to resist?”
To answer the second question first: Of course there are.
To answer the first question: I’m only saying that when people despair (or grow old without seeing progress made; or are attacked frequently by gov; or misunderstood by other people; or see a seemingly hopeless situation going downhill further), often they may perceive that “fight or flight” are the only alternatives left. That’s when they MAY make the decision to leave.
(And BTW, they may also “fight” from abroad–with money, propaganda and/or direct or indirect communications, recruitment, or in other ways too questionable to mention.)
You want us to “dig deeper.” How deep must we dig, and for how long? It is the individual’s will that decides those answers, what he can take, and how he will respond to the challenge. I’m not approving or disapproving of any action for those who choose to stay or leave.
Speaking truth to power requires a certain amount of courage. Mustering courage requires a certain depth, or strength, of character.
It has been my observation that the majority of people happily choose excuses, easy outs. In this time, choosing to be easily led, and of colorless matter will only sentence one to pawndom.
It really does not matter what my personal opinion is regarding the efficacy of flight, what matters is if it serves the person and those whose lives are impacted by the decision.
Personally, I find myself torn by the hope of returning our system into the hands of the people on the one hand, and sheer disgust over how perverse it has become on the other.