Senators to Unveil the Ex-Patriot Act to Respond to Facebook’s Saverin | Hacker News Reader

Senators to Unveil the Ex-Patriot Act to Respond to Facebook’s Saverin

abcnews.go.com

14 pointskyleslattery30 comments

Anyone notice the tone of the comments? Financial berlin wall being the most frequent.

Sheer lunancy. Saverin is a world citizen who lived in the US for a time while it was prudent and now longer does. The policies that cause this should be looked at rather than creating more broken policies.

What happens under this law if you are already living in the US and renounce your citizenship for tax reasons and have no other country of which you are a resident? Do you get deported to NULL?

You cannot renounce your citizenship while in the country. The process requires you leave the US, enter an embassy or consulate and declare your intention to renounce. File some paperwork and you're no longer a citizen.

The catch is you'll probably want to do this in a friendly country or one you're already a citizen of.

You can't renounce your citizenship whilst in the US. You have to do it at an embassy.

On statelessness: Persons intending to renounce U.S. citizenship should be aware that, unless they already possess a foreign nationality, they may be rendered stateless and, thus, lack the protection of any government. They may also have difficulty traveling as they may not be entitled to a passport from any country. Even if they were not stateless, they would still be required to obtain a visa to travel to the United States, or show that they are eligible for admission pursuant to the terms of the Visa Waiver Pilot Program (VWPP). If found ineligible for a visa or the VWPP to come to the U.S., a renunciant, under certain circumstances, could be barred from entering the United States. Nonetheless, renunciation of U.S. citizenship may not prevent a foreign country from deporting that individual back to the United States in some non-citizen status.

http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenship_776.html

They are dozens of countries that will give you citizenship if you pay, like the US does(If you have money you become citizen).

Is there a list of these countries somewhere? The only country that I know of that sells citizenship was Sealand (they don't anymore, but they were offering passports as a fundraiser).

http://principality-of-sealand.eu/faq_e.html

Actually, the above website may not be from the REAL Sealand... long story.

At the moment there's only two countries left that formally and openly grant citizenship with zero years of required residency in exchange for cash: St. Kitts and the Commonwealth of Dominica. In the 1990s there were a lot more (Grenada, Belize, Marshall Islands, etc.). Montenegro used to do this too up until recently but they came under pressure from other European countries to stop. Austria is rumoured to do it under their "contributions to national interests clause" (the one that other countries usually use to naturalise soccer players) but the price tag is in the 7 or 8 US$ figure range.

http://ciu.gov.kn/

http://www.dominica.gov.dm/cms/index.php?q=node/678

https://www.henleyglobal.com/countries/austria/citizenship/

On the other hand, dozens of countries will give you a visa in exchange for an investment; there's nothing unusual about the US in that regard, contra what forgottenpasswrd tries to imply. In some cases the "investment" is just a purchase of government bonds; in other cases it means an actual business that is capital-intensive and generates good jobs for locals. After you get the visa, you still have to actually live there for some period of time and show evidence of integration (like speaking the language) to qualify for naturalisation. The amount of money and the period of time range from four or five figures and a couple of years (Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Dominican Republic) all the way up to seven figures and the better part of a decade (Hong Kong, Germany).

I could see imposing US capital gains taxes, but barring travel to the US seems vindictive.

I believe that is the point, honestly.

Countries should never appear vindictive, as it also makes them look petty and weak.

[edit] Also, how does it make sense to impose taxes AND bar them from entry? Seems like more of an either/or type of situation. If someone is paying US taxes, then obviously they should be allowed entry; no one wants to fund the mechanism that punishes them. [/edit]

Sen. Schumer is in many ways the senatorial equivalent of a personal injury lawyer who advertises on the back of a bus.

He's a good politician, but a master self-promter. He focuses on hot issues to get cheap name recognition like the iPhone 4 "antennagate" issue, airport baggage fees, caffinated malt liquor and similar nonsense.

I think they are pitching it as a sort of 'exit tax' in response to perceived abuse.

I wonder what would happen if it wasn't such a waste of money to give it to the government. Would people be more inclined to stick around and do so? I don't blame him one bit, seems like most of his money would end up bailing out a bank or something equally disagreeable.

The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.

If you start from an unproven assertion ('all government spending is waste'), you can believe whatever you want. Things like, "Hey, I'm not being an out-for-myself bastard who's reneging on his obligations to society by being a tax cheat, I'm John Galt! I'm a good guy!".

Without the US ecosystem, it's hard to see facebook being as successful as it has been. It's pretty weak to turn around after that and say you're not obligated to pay US taxes.

Well of course he has been paying US taxes, while he lived here. When he stops living here, the USA shouldn't have any claim to tax him anymore, that's just common sense. He's going to pay taxes on the stocks he owns when he leaves as if he had just sold them; that's about half a billion dollars in taxes. Congress thinks that's not enough, apparently.

First rule of false argument is to push a sound argument to an extreme and ridicule it. The argument is not "all government spending is waste" but rather "significant part of government spending is the product of narrow, sectorial and personal interests which are not that different from Saverin's". That's unfortunately a sound argument. You could easily find sum equal to his tax savings wasted without a remote linkage to anything patriotic.

"Significant part" is a weasel word. You talking 10%? 90%? In order to justify a moral imperative not to pay taxes, it's gotta be towards the 90% end, so I wasn't misstating the implication. Just cutting through the weasel words.

I wasn't pushing the argument to the extreme - it started off as extreme.

Even 1% would be far more than Saverin's saving. You should really read Lawrence Lessig.

He presumably paid capital gains taxes on his Facebook stock when he left the country.

You might find his disloyalty to America distasteful, as I do - if his citizenship was so easily discarded, perhaps he shouldn't have acquired it in the first place. You might believe long-term capital gains tax rates are too low. But if you're implying this man is a tax cheat who's reneging on his obligations to society, that's just slander. As far as I can tell he followed the law, paid his taxes, and kept his obligations.

I wasn't slandering Saverin specifically so much as the notion that there's a principled reason to avoid paying taxes. There are plenty of selfish reasons, and I'm not Mother Theresa so I'm not claiming to be better than anyone. But call it what it is.

I know that some level of taxation is necessary to keep society running along, and am not against taxation per se. But I do try to legally minimize my taxes, because I want my own family to be well-provided for and because I want to direct my charitable giving to my own community and causes.

If that's selfish, I guess I'm selfish - but is this motivation truly so terrible?

Nothing so bad about that, I do the same, within reason. I'm just saying acknowledge it for what it is. And when you have billions, it's a fair bit more selfish.

Will this also include corporations that use foreign incorporation to reduce US taxes?

And I can't connect …owns an estimated 4 percent of Facebook and stands to make $4 billion… with …help him duck up to $67 million in taxes.

He is allegedly avoiding a 1.7% tax on his projected $4000 million? It sounds a bit of a stretch to say he'd renounce citizenship just to save what amounts to trading noise. (e.g. AAPL and GOOG each moved more than that in the last 3 hours, in opposite directions.)

From what I've heard, the "exit tax" is equivalent to paying capital gains tax (fairly low 15%) on all stocks you currently hold. His will come to $0.5B in taxes! So leaving the country might avoid some other taxes that come to $170M. Anyway he's currently living in Singapore, so maybe switching citizenship wasn't as big a deal.

Wow, it is incredible how the US is becoming more and more of a police state day after day. The currency devaluation by the Fed, the TSA, the patriot act, the bail outs, and now trying to prevent by force of the law citizens escaping the country.

We should be creating a tax structure that makes people clamoring to bring their wealth into the country - not maneuvering to leave.

I really wish politicians were willing to sit back and do nothing for one-off non-problems. I can't say I approve of Saverin's maneuvering, and dodging taxes by renouncing citizenship is in poor taste, but do we really need a law just for this one guy?

There was approximately 1800 people who relinquished citizenship this year. If each of these people has a net worth over $1m this could very quickly add up to a significant amount of lost tax revenue.

And if each of those people has a perpetual motion machine, the world's energy problems would be solved forever.

Do you have any sort of basis in your "net worth over $1m" idea, or is that just pure speculation? Because in the absence of actual numbers, I can't see why you'd even make that statement.

Let's assume they have an average net worth of not $1M but $10M each, and that the US government is able to confiscate 100% of it, leaving them utterly penniless but netting $18B.

The federal deficit for 2012 was ~$1.3 trillion, so that $18B is about 1.5% of the shortfall.

I'm not saying $18B isn't significant - but focusing on 'the rich' or 'expatriates' or any other high-net-worth group just isn't going to solve America's problems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com