Tag: migration

Facebook Billionaire Gives Up Citizenship to Escape Bad American Tax Policy

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

It is very sad that America’s tax system is so onerous that some rich people feel they have no choice but to give up U.S. citizenship in order to protect their family finances.

I’ve written about this issue before, particularly in the context of Obama’s class-warfare policies leading to an increase in the number of Americans “voting with their feet” for places with less punitive tax regimes.

We now have a very high-profile tax expatriate. One of the founders of Facebook is escaping to Singapore. Here are some relevant passages from a Bloomberg article.

Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co-founder of Facebook Inc. (FB), renounced his U.S. citizenship before an initial public offering that values the social network at as much as $96 billion, a move that may reduce his tax bill. …Saverin’s stake is about 4 percent, according to the website Who Owns Facebook. At the high end of the IPO valuation, that would be worth about $3.84 billion. …Saverin, 30, joins a growing number of people giving up U.S. citizenship, a move that can trim their tax liabilities in that country. …“Eduardo recently found it more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time,” said Tom Goodman, a spokesman for Saverin, in an e-mailed statement. …Singapore doesn’t have a capital gains tax. It does tax income earned in that nation, as well as “certain foreign-sourced income,” according to a government website on tax policies there. …Renouncing your citizenship well in advance of an IPO is “a very smart idea” from a tax standpoint, said Avi-Yonah. “Once it’s public you can’t fool around with the value.” …Renouncing citizenship is an option chosen by increasing numbers of Americans. A record 1,780 gave up their U.S. passports last year compared with 235 in 2008, according to government records. …“It’s a loss for the U.S. to have many well-educated people who actually have a great deal of affection for America make that choice,” said Richard Weisman, an attorney at Baker & McKenzie in Hong Kong. “The tax cost, complexity and the traps for the unwary are among the considerations.”

What makes this story amusing, from a personal perspective, is that Saverin’s expatriation takes place just a couple of days after my wayward friend Bruce Bartlett wrote a piece for the New York Times in which he said that people like me are exaggerating the impact of taxes on migration. Here are some key excerpts from Bruce’s column:

In recent years, the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship has increased. …This led William McGurn of The Wall Street Journal to warn that the tax code is turning American citizens living abroad into “economic lepers.” The sharply rising numbers of Americans renouncing their citizenship “are canaries in the coal mine,” he wrote. The economist Dan Mitchell of the libertarian Cato Institute was more explicit in a 2010 column in Forbes, “Rich Americans Voting With Their Feet to Escape Obama Tax Oppression.” …[T]he sharp rise in Americans renouncing their citizenship since 2008 is less pronounced than it appears if one looks at the full range of data available since 1997, when it first was collected. As one can see in the chart, the highest number of Americans renouncing their citizenship came in 1997. …The reality is that taxes are just one factor among many that determine where people choose to live. Factors including climate, proximity to those in similar businesses and the availability of amenities like the arts and cuisine play a much larger role. That’s why places like New York and California are still magnets for the wealthy despite high taxes. And although a few Americans may renounce their citizenship to avoid American taxes, it is obvious that many, many more people continually seek American residency and citizenship.

I actually agree with Bruce. Taxes are just one factor when people make decisions on where to live, work, save, and invest.

But I also think Bruce is drinking too much of the Kool-Aid being served by his new friends on the left. There is a wealth of data on successful people leaving jurisdictions such as California and New York that have confiscatory tax systems.

And there’s also a lot of evidence of taxpayers escaping countries controlled by politicians who get too greedy. Mr. Saverin is just the latest example. And I suspect, based on the overseas Americans I meet, that there are several people who quietly go “off the grid” for every person who officially expatriates.

The statists say these people are “tax traitors” and “economic Benedict Arnolds,” but those views are based on a quasi-totalitarian ideology that assumes government has some sort of permanent claim on people’s economic output.

If people are leaving America because our tax law is onerous, that’s a signal we should reform the tax code. Attacking those who expatriate is the fiscal version of blaming the victim.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, International Economics and Development, Tax and Budget Policy

Sweet Commerce

By
David Boaz

A study on anti-Semitism in Germany offers the disturbing finding that “communities that murdered their Jewish populations during the 14th-century Black Death pogroms were more likely to demonstrate a violent hatred of Jews nearly 600 years later,” during the Nazi era. But cities

with more of an outward orientation—in particular, cities that were a part of the Hanseatic League of Northern Europe, which brought outside influence via commerce and trade—showed almost no correlation between medieval and modern pogroms. The same was true for cities with high rates of population growth—with sufficient in-migration, the newcomers may have changed the attitudes of the local culture.

Free trade helps lead to peace, prosperity, and the erosion of prejudice.

Topics: 
General, Political Philosophy

Marriage against the State

By
Jason Kuznicki

I’m pleased to announce the publication of my new Cato Policy Analysis, “Marriage against the State: Toward a New View of Civil Marriage.”

As I note in the introduction, it’s quite rare that Congress ever considers marriage as a policy area in its own right. There are comprehensive health care bills, defense spending bills, farm bills, and civil rights bills, but no really comprehensive marriage bills.

Of course, this might be a good thing, but one of the side effects is that marriage policy can be haphazard in the extreme. Inconsistencies and surprises abound. Marriage influences welfare, immigration, tax law, child custody and support, and many others besides.

Are all of these things legitimate? A popular view among libertarians is that the federal government, and possibly the states, should get out of the marriage business altogether. It’s an approach with much to recommend it, but I can’t entirely agree. For at least some areas of public policy, marriage represents a barrier to government meddling in your financial, family, and intimate life. In these areas, it’s an unqualified good. Marriage is often a defense against the state, and as such, it’s something libertarians ought to want.

Consider child custody. All children born to a married couple are presumed to belong to them. You don’t have to do anything special to assert your paternity (or maternity). You are presumed to have it. This is probably for the best. Inviting the government to prospectively examine married couples’ fitness as parents is one of the most corrosive things I could imagine doing to the nuclear family.

Or consider the gift-tax exemption for married couples. Husbands and wives may gift one another money or property without limits, tax-free. It’s an important part of the financial independence that we are accustomed to having in our families, and it allows a family to conduct an interdependent financial life with dignity and autonomy.

Yet this same exemption, oddly enough, can make a legal divorce cheaper than the breakup of a never-married relationship. A married couple can divide their assets, including houses, cars, and other properties, before they split up. A never-married couple will often have to pay taxes on their pre-breakup transfers – making the government in effect a third party to their relationship. No one would want this for all couples, of course, least of all libertarians.

Extricating marriage from other parts of federal law won’t be easy, either. For some fairly complicated reasons that I explain in the paper, the only way to make the income tax fully neutral with respect to marriage – and also neutral across families with unequal income distributions between spouses – is to adopt a flat tax. While I share the view of many of my Cato colleagues that a flat tax is a good idea, the marriage-related consequences of our current tax system aren’t always appreciated as a reason to move in that direction. They should be.

As a third example, consider immigration. Marriage to a citizen considerably hastens the process of immigrating legally. Even if that process were not unconscionably slow (which I think it is), we would probably still want the immigration of marriage partners to be a high priority. Immigrant spouses of citizens are clearly integrated to some extent into American society. The American spouses’ own liberty interests are clearly implicated. And, perhaps best of all for critics of immigration, immigrant spouses’ numbers are relatively small in any case.

Lastly, and because I know a lot of you probably skimmed up to this point, I do discuss same-sex marriage. One of the more common arguments against same-sex marriage is that those who have moral objections shouldn’t be forced to subsidize same-sex unions with their tax money.

Let’s grant the basic justice of the argument (and never mind that Quakers, Buddhists, and others could morally object to our enormous defense spending!). Still, it’s not well known that by the best available estimates, federal same-sex marriage would leave the government in a better fiscal position, not a worse one. A good way to channel less federal money to same-sex couples is actually… to allow them to marry.

Why is this? Well, some married couples still pay a marriage penalty, and gay and lesbian couples obviously would too. More significantly, spouses’ incomes and assets are declared in the means testing for federal welfare programs. Marriage would exclude some gays and lesbians from these programs. They may want marriage anyway, but on balance, it’s clearly not for grabbing federal dollars.

I discuss quite a few other marriage-related issues in this Policy Analysis, and even so, it’s not remotely comprehensive. My goal is to suggest a new way of thinking about marriage, one that evaluates the effects of various marriage-related policies using the individual right to form a family as the standard. Not every aspect of federal marriage policy stands up, but some of them do. Let’s let a new conversation begin.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties, Tax and Budget Policy

Americans Voting with their Feet

By
Daniel J. Mitchell

The Financial Times reports that the number of Americans giving up their citizenship to protect their families from America’s onerous worldwide tax system has jumped rapidly. Even relatively high-tax nations such as the United Kingdom are attractive compared to the class-warfare system that President Obama is creating in the United States.

I run into people like this quite often as part of my travels. They are intensely patriotic to America as a nation, but they have lots of scorn for the federal government.

Statists are perfectly willing to forgive terrorists like William Ayres, but they heap scorn on these “Benedict Arnold” taxpayers. But the tax exiles get the last laugh since the bureaucrats and politicians now get zero percent of their foreign-source income. You would think that, sooner or later, the left would realize they can get more tax revenue with reasonable tax rates. But that assumes that collectivists are motivated by revenue maximization rather than spite and envy.

From the FT article:

The number of wealthy Americans living in the UK who are renouncing their US citizenship is rising rapidly as more expatriates seek to escape paying tax to the US on their worldwide income and gains and shed their “non-dom” status, accountants say. As many as 743 American expatriates made the irreversible decision to discard their passports last year, according to the US government – three times as many as in 2008. …There is a waiting list at the embassy in London for people looking to give up citizenship, with the earliest appointments in February, lawyers and accountants say. …“The big disadvantage with American citizens is they catch you on tax wherever you are in the world. If you are taxed only in the UK, you have the opportunity of keeping your money offshore tax free.”

To grasp the extent of this problem, here are blurbs from two other recent stories. Time magazine discusses the unfriendly rules that make life a hassle for overseas Americans:

For U.S. citizens, cutting ties with their native land is a drastic and irrevocable step. …[I]t’s one that an increasing number of American expats are willing to take. According to government records, 502 expatriates renounced U.S. citizenship or permanent residency in the fourth quarter of 2009 — more than double the number of expatriations in all of 2008. And these figures don’t include the hundreds — some experts say thousands — of applications languishing in various U.S. consulates and embassies around the world, waiting to be processed. …[T]he new surge in permanent expatriations is mainly because of taxes. …[E]xpatriate organizations say the recent increase reflects a growing dissatisfaction with the way the U.S. government treats its expats and their money: the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that taxes its overseas citizens, subjecting them to taxation in both their country of citizenship and country of residence. …Additionally, the U.S. government has implemented tougher rules requiring expatriates to report any foreign bank accounts exceeding $10,000, with stiff financial penalties for noncompliance. “This system is widely perceived as overly complex with multiple opportunities for accidental mistakes, and life-altering penalties for inadvertent failures,” Hodgen says. These stringent measures were put into place to prevent Americans from stashing undeclared assets in offshore banks, but they also make life increasingly difficult for millions of law-abiding expatriates. “The U.S. government creates conflict and abuses me,” says business owner John. “I feel under duress to understand and comply with laws that have nothing to do with me and are constantly changing — almost never in my favor.” …Many U.S. expats report being turned away by banks and other institutions in their countries of residence only because they are American, according to American Citizens Abroad (ACA), a Geneva-based worldwide advocacy group for expatriate U.S. citizens. “We have become toxic citizens,” says ACA founder Andy Sundberg. Paradoxically, by relinquishing their U.S. citizenship, expats can not only escape the financial burden of double taxation, but also strengthen the U.S. economy, he says, adding, “It will become much easier for these people to get a job abroad, and to set up, own and operate private companies that can promote American exports.”

The New York Times, meanwhile, delves into the misguided policies that are driving Americans to renounce their citizenship.

Amid mounting frustration over taxation and banking problems, small but growing numbers of overseas Americans are taking the weighty step of renouncing their citizenship. …[F]rustrations over tax and banking questions, not political considerations, appear to be the main drivers of the surge. Expat advocates say that as it becomes more difficult for Americans to live and work abroad, it will become harder for American companies to compete. American expats have long complained that the United States is the only industrialized country to tax citizens on income earned abroad, even when they are taxed in their country of residence, though they are allowed to exclude their first $91,400 in foreign-earned income. One Swiss-based business executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of sensitive family issues, said she weighed the decision for 10 years. She had lived abroad for years but had pleasant memories of service in the U.S. Marine Corps. Yet the notion of double taxation — and of future tax obligations for her children, who will receive few U.S. services — finally pushed her to renounce, she said. …Stringent new banking regulations — aimed both at curbing tax evasion and, under the Patriot Act, preventing money from flowing to terrorist groups — have inadvertently made it harder for some expats to keep bank accounts in the United States and in some cases abroad. Some U.S.-based banks have closed expats’ accounts because of difficulty in certifying that the holders still maintain U.S. addresses, as required by a Patriot Act provision.

Topics: 
Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy, Government and Politics, International Economics and Development, Tax and Budget Policy

In Praise of the Brain Drain

By
Ian Vásquez

The standard view in policy discussions is that emigration of skilled workers from poor countries to rich countries is bad for development becuase it deprives poor countries of much-needed human capital and it reduces growth.

A new study by Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development challenges this view. Clemens shows that efforts to slow the so-called brain drain “generally brings few benefits to others, and often brings diverse unintended harm.” There is little evidence that limiting skilled migration improves growth or public finances in poor countries, while following such a policy may reduce the demand for education, international trade and capital flows, and the diffusion of ideas and norms. There is also a gap between the policy discussion (that takes the negative aspects of the brain drain for granted) and the research literature (that reaches much more ambiguous conclusions). Clemens also rightly stresses choice and freedom as central factors to consider when formualting policy–an element so far missing from the policy discussions.

The study was first released this spring as a background paper to the UN’s forthcoming Human Development 2009 annual report, which will focus on migration and incorporate much of Clemens’ work.

Topics: 
General, Trade and Immigration