Eduardo Saverin renounced his American citizenship rather than pay $67 million in taxes on his Facebook IPO. Why not get rid of illegal immigrants by paying them off?
Let Them Be Tax Refugees
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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I wasn’t comment on this, but I can’t resist: why should Saverin keep on paying taxes on a country he no longer lives in? For that matter why is the US one of the few countries (developed or not) that taxes non-resident citizens? Why should you pay for the “privilege” of droning dark-sinned people half way across the globe when you’re not under the protection of the “freedom-spreading” Uncle Sam?
And, last but not least, let’s not forget Saverin isn’t even a native born US citizen. IMO, he should have never acquired US citizenship, but his parents probably thought it was a good idea at the time.
*@ bucephalus* – The U.S. taxes even non-resident aliens! (Perhaps you’re aware that I reside in Mexico.) A couple of days ago, a Mexican acquaintance asked me to help him fill out his tax return. He had earned less than $6,000 in New York State and had paid something like $7.00 in Federal Income Tax, which I determined was due as a refund.
1. For American agriculture to remain the world leader, it desperately needs illegal immigrants.
Since legal immigrants have rights, and rights are expensive, letting farm workers in legally would overburden our agricultural sector. Really keeping illegal farm workers out would crush our agricultural sector.
2. The majority of Americans want their party, Democratic or Republican, to adopt a few of the planks of the Know Nothing platform, and, American being a democracy, it must give them their way: they want to make all immigration illegal, put up impenetrable barricades along all US borders, and round up all the illegals inside the US and deport the lot of them.
3. The apparent contradiction between 1 and 2 is not a practical contradiction: both parties agree to keep immigration illegal; to make a few, spectacular roundups of insignificant size to mollify the voters of item 2 (and also to grab and ship out the odd Hispanic citizens who have no papers with them, a la Born in East LA because that, too, is popular), and to quietly look the other way and allow in enough illegal immigrants to ensure that the crops get harvested cheaply, and sometimes for free, if the farmer reports all his workers to La Migra the day before payday.
So the current immigration system is perfect, and cannot be improved!
@ michaelwme –
No argument from me. Illegal immigration has been a “problem” since before I was born – and I’ll be 70 next birthday. The U.S. could certainly have solved the “problem” in the span of 70 years.
But it isn’t only agriculture who needs them. The Big Box Stores love them, too.
🙂
I thought the real illegal-immigrant problem in that part of the North American continent now called the United States started on 14 May 1607 at a place the illegal immigrants called Jamestown in what is now Virginia….
Henri