"tax the rich, and they will leave"...not really

originally posted by: stormson
Now for you "going Galt" people (yes, I've read "Atlas Shrugged") show me one rich person that gave up and left due to taxes to live off their vast fortunes.

www.bloomberg.com...

Rich Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship rose sevenfold since UBS AG whistle-blower Bradley Birkenfeld triggered a crackdown on tax evasion four years ago.
About 1,780 expatriates gave up their nationality at U.S. embassies last year, up from 235 in 2008, according to Andy Sundberg, secretary of Geneva’s Overseas American Academy, citing figures from the government’s Federal Register. The embassy in Bern, the Swiss capital, redeployed staff to clear a backlog as Americans queued to relinquish their passports.
The U.S., the only nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside, is searching for tax cheats in offshore centers, including Switzerland, as the government tries to curb the budget deficit. Shunned by Swiss and German banks and facing tougher asset-disclosure rules under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, more of the estimated 6 million Americans living overseas are weighing the cost of holding a U.S. passport.

www.mainstreet.com...

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — In the first quarter of 2015 the highest number of Americans - ever - renounced their citizenship. The number, 1,335, is a relatively small proportion of the population at large, but the U.S. now appears to be on track to log more citizenship renunciations in 2015 than in any prior year.

Year-on-year the total keeps growing. In 2013, 2,999 renounced their citizenship, an increase of 221% from 2012. In 2014, 3,415 renounced their citizenship, the highest total ever. But 2015 appears to be on track to see 5,000 say goodbye to the U.S., said David Hryck, a partner at Reed Smith in New York and a tax lawyer with a clientele studded with one-percenters. He added: “I have so many clients asking me about doing this now.”

www.examiner.com...

More wealthy U.S. taxpayers renounced citizenship in the first six months of 2015 than renounced in President George W. Bush’s entire last term in office. This puts citizenship renunciations among the wealthy on track to set yet another new annual record in 2015. In fact, formal renunciations among the wealthy, which were going down when Obama took office, have risen every year since, except one. By a strange coincidence, that one year was an election year.

Atlas is beginning to roll his shoulders.

a reply to: burdman30ott6

So rich people want to stay as long as they can use American consumers and infrastructure to their advantage to make, I assume, more money? But when they are asked to contribute to the country that helped make them rich they take their private jets to someplace that won't ask anything of them?
Because in their minds the place that helped make them rich had nothing to do with their personal awesomeness in becoming rich? Or are these ex-pats the entitled "silver spooners?

Nice. The essence of Patriotism and Civic Duty.

Whatever. Don't let the door smack you on the way out...

a reply to: AboveBoard

Uh... the top 1% paid 48% of all taxes collected and the top 20% paid 84% in 2014. Where the fudge did this ignorant idea that they aren't contributing come from? If you want blood, go after the bottom 47% who paid negative net taxes in 2014... there are your damn takers who contribute nothing to the overall coffers.

a reply to: burdman30ott6

Here is the problem though: the top 20% own 85% of the wealth.

Just prior to President Obama's 2014 State of the Union Address, media[4] reported that the top wealthiest 1% possess 40% of the nation’s wealth; the bottom 80% own 7%; similarly, but later, the media reported, the "richest 1 percent in the United States now own more additional income than the bottom 90 percent".[5] The gap between the top 10% and the middle class is over 1,000%; that increases another 1000% for the top 1%. The average employee "needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO earns in one hour."[6] Although different from income inequality, the two are related. In Inequality for All—a 2013 documentary with Robert Reich in which he argued that income inequality is the defining issue for the United States—Reich states that 95% of economic gains went to the top 1% net worth (HNWI) since 2009 when linkthe recovery allegedly started.[7]

When one group owns so much more, the fact that they pay only 48% of collected taxes is questionable.

If the wealth gap were not so severe, if the middle class were not so constricted, then I could understand your point of view. On the surface it doesn't seem fair for them to pay almost half of the nations tax revenue. Digging deeper however, it seems that the top folks are so Disproportionately wealthy, that they should bear more of the burden. They are also the ones who made large gains while everyone else foundered.

"fair" is relative.

AB