Slashdot Mirror
Senators To Unveil the 'Ex-Patriot Act' To Respond To Facebook's Saverin
An anonymous reader writes "Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has a status update for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin: Stop attempting to dodge your taxes by renouncing your U.S. citizenship or never come to back to the U.S. again." See this earlier story on Saverin's plan to make the leap out of the U.S. tax system.
Only when you're so fucking twisted you actually consider things like environmental standards, community programs designed to help the needy, and taxes of any type 'oppressive'.
But don't you worry...the first-world manner in which we live will survive, despite the selfish efforts of people like you to torpedo it for their own personal gain.
don't we have much bigger things to worry about? This isn't a common case....well, it might be if things continue the way they are going.
Yeah, the "Ex-PATRIOT Act" sounds like just a bunch of bullshit political theater. In the case of Saverin, the U.S. will lose an estimated $67 million dollars in tax revenue. Now consider that this $67 million wouldn't even pay for a single F-35 fighter ($195 million), or 6 hours of fighting in Afghanistan ($300 million per day). It's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall defense budget ($700 billion) or entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid ($1.5 trillion).
Schumer is just posturing, this bill won't do a damn thing to address the real issues- a poor economy, excessive government spending, and low tax rates- it just seems to be an attempt to distract from the deep problems we face by stirring up popular resentment against one filthy-rich individual.
Here's the situation. Most economists agree that it's not going to be possible to get the deficit under control by either just increasing taxes, or just cutting spending- we're going to have to do both. The question is whether it's going to be possible to raise enough money by just going after the 1%. The 1% do make a ton of money, but there's just not that many of them- only 1% of the population, after all- so even if you taxed them all at 100% it wouldn't balance the budget. That means tax increases on the middle class, who are responsible for the bulk of U.S. federal tax dollars.