Goldman Sachs rules the world.

If everyone who made it big left the states and didn't pay taxes the country would be doomed. the same country he made his fortune from. i'd like to see the facebook guy try and repeat his success in india or china. it just wouldn't happen. the average joes of the world make or break businesses like this and while they don't pay the kind of taxes the guys at the top would, without them there would be no fortune to be had.

His success in what? Do you even know who the guy is that's being discussed? He didn't do anything or create anything, I believe he just provided initial funding. He is actually a very bright guy that was making piles of money while studying at Harvard with stocks. Bright people are going to be bright and flourish anywhere in the world.

Success in India or China? You live under a rock? Those places are filled with billionaires making billions.

If the US wants to keep capital and investors in the country, then the US needs to create favorable business and tax conditions/laws for that to happen, not more absurd laws and increased taxes.

(sorry for typos below. It's hard to edit on an iPhone)

I find totally bizarre that on a board which is supposedly filled with entrepreneurs who are trying to make money for themselves, the idea that someone would become rich by coming up with a great idea would be "disgusting". When I was growing up I thought that people that did that were "inspirational" and I wanted to be like them. Now the fact that they will still NE rich after taxes is "disgusting"??? Why the hell are you running your own business for, so you can be poor? So you can be working class? If that is your goal and being rich would be disgusting then perhaps you should just play it say and get a job as a landscaper for the local municipality....

:thumbsup

Ok, so a guy living in a dirt shack in some third world country is going to be just as successful as trust fund kid with money to burn? yeah right. regardless of what the guy did i am not just talking about him but everyone who gets rich selling products or services to americans. even the billionaires in india and china are largely rich due to selling products to other countries and even the ones that do sell to their own people, the only way they are able to pay for it is because they have jobs that export products to north america.

Probably not anymore than a drunk hillbilly in Kentucky is going to be successful.

Facebook is hardly "american". It's global

93.452% of all facts are made up on the spot.

You're clearly a well traveled man of the world with a strong grasp on macro economics and global economies. How many Russian products have you bought this week? None? This month? None? This year? None again? Really? That just doesn't make sense.

i think its digusting that these guys are so greedy they can't standing losing a portion to taxes, not that they have been very successful, just that they are turning their backs on the very culture/country that made it possible. you wouldn't find me moving to some semi third world nation leaving behind friends family and all that i love about my country just to save some money that i will most likely never use or need. everyone wants to be successful but no one wants to follow the rules once they are. its like skipping out on the bill after eating a nice expensive dinner. a dick move. hey i'd like to pay less or no taxes too but its just not reality. and despite to pieces of shit at the bottom that so many people love to look down on, without those pieces of shit you got no one buying your products or using your services. the average shitbags out there are the ones driving consumerism.

the rich are leaving a sinking ship dont you see it, US is going down the drain.

Moving wealth to asia is a a good option for the future

Wow wow wow !!!

I errr ummmm just wow!

Are you serious with that insanely ignorant statement?

It is depressing to read statements like that, makes me wonder if there are actually that many rocks for people to live under.

EDIT

Singapore is a 'semi third world nation' ? LOLOLOL!!

Have you got any idea how much tax he has paid over the last few years already? You couldn't even begin to dream about that amount.

He's paid much, much more tax than he has every costed the US. Can you say the same?

wow wow wow LOL LOL LOL are you so fucking retarded thats all you can say? why not prove me wrong.

Singapore is more developed country then US is.

Its one of those countries where if you've got, you've got lots and if you don't, you have nothing. Not to mention its a dictatorship country. Regardless, I was talking about one specific country. There are a number of countries people flee to to avoid taxes.

Some comments made me go Har har har!

The media made it to appear like he wanted to avoid paying taxes, but in actual fact, he told me he just fell in love with the chicken rice and chili crab :thumbsup

Hard to explain to the poor and uneducated the complexities of wealth creation and economics - but I'll try to dumb it down.

He funds the creation of Facebook

Facebook employs 300-ish people

Facebook has created depending on how you attribute them, probably well in excess of 100,000 jobs. Meaning zynga and their employees, their vendors and contractors.

Meaning every maker of Facebook apps that killed it and their contractors an vendors.

Meaning everyone that crushed it with spending over $1,000,000,000.00+ USD on facebook advertising per year and grew their business and hired more people

Meaning all the companies the embraced the worlds number one social media platform, used it well and grew their companies to employ more people etc etc etc

Facebook has certainly brought billions into the US economy thanks to Mr Saverin. But that's not enough for you tards right? He still owes you?

In spite of such obvious facts, the poor and uneducated would like to tell him to how much more he owes the State. That's a very creepy, Stalinist/Leninist, Maoist, Marxist, dictatorial attitude that has failed very nation who fully embraced that thinking. Even china abandoned that idiocy and it's insane that Americans would embrace it. We have no debt to the state other than embracing and defending the ideals on which it was founded and most don't even do that unless they're newly immigrated in which case their usually just to busy out working all you far, lazy fucks to think about it.

How about this... How about we start trying to create conditions conducive to creating the next Facebook rather than chasing money and citizens out of the country. At the end of the day, your petty "you owe me" attitude is going to be the reason the US loses economically to smaller and developing nations who are trying grow by creating a climate for growth, a climate to attract bright people and a climate that attracts wealth.

You're trying to correct a poor uneducated American fool who hasn't been more than a few miles from his front door but feels he's got a solid grasp on global issues even down to a country by country, city by city level.

keep regurgitating the bs you've been told and over and over again and maybe eventually you'll believe it. how many jobs did facebook kill? i'm sure many were lost at myspace, hi5, etc, etc. anyways, just for the record i think income taxes should be done away with and instead have a higher sales taxes but in the meantime while facebook may be global, americans made it popular and there are probably more americans on facebook than anything else. oh, i am not american.

typical poor man speaking

since when is harvard free and paid by US tax payers?

if you could you would do the same, if you had $$$

beside philliphones

Regurgitating what? Name one single myspace app that became a multi billion dollar company and generated billions in revenue. Oh... right. Sorry, there are none.

There is no comparison to what Facebook has done in the social media space and the wealth they've created. There is not even a close second, so its irrelevant if myspace.com went out of business. They were on their way out of business because of the seizure inducing clusterfuck that site was, before Facebook even went online.

Me too.

Not relevant to anything.

Eastern Canada! Got it.

Ever stop to think that it's not because of taxes?

Perhaps the wealthy who are leaving in record numbers simply see the writing on the wall, that the USA is quickly losing her status as the world superpower that it once was, that the economy is in the shitter with no real recovery coming anytime soon, the USA has turned into a police state that is getting worse, and the actual risk of a currency collapse is growing greater.

Taxes have always been there but people have not renounced their citizenship at the level they are doing now. This makes me believe it is not tax related. The super wealthy are usually a few steps ahead of the masses so perhaps everyone should be taking this more seriously than they are. Perhaps they know something or see something that the rest of America doesn't, or refuses to believe.

Why don't you use google before you make such ignorant comments about other countrys.

Singapore is not a third world country, not even a *semi* third world country.

What makes me laugh is you think just because a country is asian, it is automatically *third world* :1orglaugh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore
"The country has the world's third highest GDP PPP per capita of US$59,936, making Singapore one of the world's wealthiest countries."

Sounds pretty *semi third world* to me :thumbsup

Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, Taiwan, parts of China... all anything but 3rd world. Especially Singapore. That may be the most civilized place on earth, and it's BOOMING right now. Very developed. If it wasn't so humid I would live there in a heartbeat.

The taxes on the wealthy were always raised to 77%, 73%, 67%, 95%, etc... throughout our history to pay for Great Depression, World War I, World War II, etc... from the 1930s through to the 1980s until Reagan started lowering it. I don't recall any kind of super wealthy mass exodus during that 60-some odd year period. Do you? Now everyone cries over a 3% suggested raise to pay for the Bush wars like it's equivalent to Hitler, Mussolini, or Communism.

I don't know the history of double taxation but it should be reformed.

Agreed. I have a relative who has lived in Taiwan for ~15 years and been there many times - definitely not 3rd world. Humidity is a killer for me too - however people seem to acclimatise fairly quickly.

Some people can get used to the humidity. I'm not one of them, and I've been in SE Asia for a while. The months where it gets really bad here I usually spend a lot of time indoors.

SE Asia has three seasons: Hot, Hot & Wet, Hot & Humid

I can deal with hot and hot & wet. Hot & humid makes me a little crazy.

So he can break the law? This isn't a debate about tax rates, but rather evasion. Huge difference.

For the record, I am for a flat tax. Whether it's 10% or 30%, if you are poor or rich. Based on consumption. That's not what this thread is about.

no.

.................

Most of your corporations effectively operate outside the U.S. in pretty well every way imagineable; from their offshore holdings, to the Asian children that actually manufacture the products that we all buy and use.

Why the fuck are you worried about one rich guy? Damn, you have more important things to consider...

If Levi-Stauss manufactured all of their products in the United States you'd more than make up the tax revenue lost from this one single guy. Americans making $8 to $20 an hour will pay a lot more taxes than Chinese school-aged children.

Probably make better pants, too. A pair of top line Levi's cost about $80 last time I bought them. That's about a $60 profit for the store. And don't bullshit me about cutting costs. Its all about profit - same as it is for this Facebook dude.

I don't blame him for bailing, and I hate Facebook.

:thumbsup

Facebook didn't relocate to China, they don't produce anything outside of the US. It needed, and still needs Silicon Valley.

There is a million and one examples of citizenship based taxes being wrong. Saverin... not one of them.

If anything it will just be justification to bring on even more rules and regulation.:2 cents:

I don't blame for staying indoors, was in Taiwan late last year in their so called cooler time and people were wearing winter clothing and here I am in shorts and a t-shirt sweating.

The food does make it all worth it, that and the local beers :thumbsup

Ah yes, the uneducated "taxes used to be higher" argument, poorly made. There was no such thing as computerized records, record sharing, etc. there were VERY few IRS agents. The rich paid the government what they felt like.
There was no way to track their incomes.

And lets not forget that IRS agents at that time were armed and used to kick in peoples front doors of their homes in 4 man assault teams in attempts to collect this money as well.

How many people remember that? When IRS agents had M-16's...

Why don't you recount some of your harrowing tales of adventure for us there, Trump. Let me guess, right now you're tucked away in your summer cabin retreat high up in the Swiss alps, roaring fire in the hearth, snifter of brandy, Afghan hounds at your feet, pipe filled with fine tobaccos from around the world as you crack open a handsome calfskin-bound first edition of Sir Walter Raleigh, Gazing at the once-fierce heads of your hunting trophies leering in the firelight, the ones you got on your last hunting safari in the Veldt where your Khoisan guide, N!xho, was lethally gored by a wildebeest. Just taking a little break from all that to impart some of your endless wordly wisdom on the plebians here on gfy, right?

At last count, i've been to 22 countries and lived out of the country for 10.
:2 cents:

My point wasn't to justify high taxes on the wealthy. It was to explain in the history of our country taxes were raised to very high percentages to pay for wars. It's only recently that it seems the war mindset (not paying your bills) has changed. The main point I was trying to make based on this thread was to highlight that there wasn't some mass exodus of wealthy Americans fleeing the country pre-Reagan.

"By 1967, all business and personal tax returns were handled by computer systems, and by the late 1960s, the IRS had developed a computerized method for selecting tax returns to be examined. "

I like the idea of a flat tax too, but something like Hong Kong has done. I don't believe in double taxation, even in what we refer to it at the corporation level.

So, I just don't believe that there's going to some mass exodus of the super wealthy in America.

The land of the free, eh?

What Eduardo Saverin owes America. (Hint: Nearly everything.)
 

When Eduardo Saverin was 13, his family discovered that his name had turned up on a list of victims to be kidnapped by Brazilian gangs. Saverin?s father was a wealthy businessman in São Paulo, and it was inevitable that he?d attract this kind of unwanted attention. Now the family had to make a permanent decision. They hastily arranged a move out of the country. And of all the places in the world they could move to, the Saverin family saw only one option. They took their talents to Miami.

Would it be too much to say that America saved Eduardo Saverin? Probably. Maybe that?s just too overwrought. The Saverins were just another in a long line of immigrants who?d come to America for the opportunity it affords?the opportunity, among other things, to not have to worry that your child will be kidnapped just because you?ve become wealthy.

Just because his parents moved here doesn?t mean Eduardo Saverin owes America anything, right?

Yet if you study the trajectory of Saverin?s life?the path that took him from being an immigrant kid to a Harvard student to an instant billionaire to the subject of an Oscar-winning motion picture?it emerges as a uniquely American story. At just about every step between his landing in Miami and his becoming a co-founder of Facebook, you find American institutions and inventions playing a significant part in his success.

Would Eduardo Saverin have been successful anywhere else? Maybe, but not as quickly, and not as spectacularly. It was only thanks to America?thanks to the American government?s direct and indirect investments in science and technology; thanks to the U.S. justice system; the relatively safe and fair investment climate made possible by that justice system; the education system that educated all of Facebook?s workers, and on and on?it was only thanks to all of this that you know anything at all about Eduardo Saverin today.

Now comes news that Saverin has decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship, most likely to avoid a large long-term tax bill on his winnings in the Facebook IPO. Saverin owns about 4 percent of Facebook stock. By renouncing his citizenship last fall, well in advance of the IPO, Saverin will pay an ?exit tax? on his assets as they were valued then. But he?ll pay no tax on income derived from stock sales in the future?that?s because he now lives in Singapore, which has no capital gains tax. It?s unclear how much this move will save him, since it depends on how Facebook?s stock performs. But let?s say the value of his stock doubles over the long run, from an estimated $3.8 billion now to around $8 billion. If that happens, he won?t pay any tax on the $4 billion increase in value?which, at a 15 percent capital gains rate, will save him $600 million in taxes.

Is this fair? No. It?s worse than that, though. It?s ungrateful and it?s indecent. Saverin?s decision to decamp the U.S. suggests he?s got no idea how much America has helped him out.

So, to enlighten him, let?s list all the ways Eduardo Saverin has benefitted from America. First and most obviously, he lived a life of relative safety in Miami, something that wasn?t guaranteed for him in Brazil. Second, also obvious: If Saverin hadn?t come to America, he wouldn?t have met Mark Zuckerberg, and?not to put too fine a point on it?if Saverin hadn?t met Zuckerberg, Saverin wouldn?t be Saverin.

Third: Harvard. Zuckerberg and his cofounders met in the dorms, and while Harvard is a nominally private institution, it enjoys significant funding and protections from the government. In 2011, Harvard received $686 million, about 18 percent of its operating revenue, from federal grants; that?s almost as much as it received from student tuition.

Would Facebook have been founded without Harvard? Perhaps?maybe Facebook would have come about wherever Zuck went to school. Still, there were social networks at lots of other schools. There was clearly something about Harvard?s student body that was receptive to Facebook.

More generally, elite, government-sponsored American universities like Harvard have been instrumental in the founding of many tech giants. Microsoft?s founders met at Harvard. Yahoo and Google?s founders met at Stanford. But even if you believe that these universities shouldn?t claim credit for the companies they brought about, it?s still hard to argue that Facebook would be where it is today without the American taxpayers? large investment in public education. Facebook depends on really smart people to make its products. You don?t get smart people without tax dollars.

Fourth: The American government?s creation of the Internet. The strangest thing about Silicon Valley?s libertarian politics is how few people here recognize how the Internet came about. ARPANET, the earliest large-scale computer network that morphed into the Internet, was funded by the U.S. Defense Department, as was the research into fundamental technologies like packet switching and TCP/IP. Delve deeper into the network and you get to the microprocessors that run the world?s computers?another technology that wouldn?t have come about by loads of federal research grants.

Even the Web itself can trace its founding to government grants. Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN, the research group funded by Europeans governments, when he worked on the HTTP protocol. Mark Andreessen worked at National Center for Supercomputing Applications?which is funded by in a partnership between the federal government and the state of Illinois?when he created the Mosaic Web browser. Then you?ve got GPS, a technology that makes much of the mobile revolution possible, and one that is wholly created and operated by the U.S. government.

Fifth: The judicial system. If it weren?t for the U.S. courts and laws, Saverin might have been permanently shut out of Facebook. But in 2009, he settled a lawsuit with Facebook that gave him credit as a co-founder and his current stake in the firm. In other words, it?s only because Saverin could sue Facebook and depend on a relatively fair judicial system that he?s got the billions on which he?s now skirting taxes.

Fair courts aren?t to be taken for granted, by the way. There are many places in the world where, if you are wronged by a billionaire, you wouldn?t be able to do anything about it. One of those places is Brazil; according to Transparency International, the courts in Saverin?s birth country are beset by corruption.

Now, none of this is to discount Saverin?s own contributions to Facebook?s success. Though he was only there at the beginning?and although he had some pretty terrible ideas for Facebook, including his plan to show interstitial ads when you went to add a friend?let?s assume that he did in fact add $4 billion of value to the world.

The question is, what?s fair for him to keep?

As an immigrant myself, I?ve got no patience for the argument that he should keep all of it. Pretty much everything in my life that I enjoy wouldn?t have happened without my being in the United States. My education, my job, my wife and family, the fact that I?m not persecuted for my race or religion (I was born in South Africa), the fact that I can sometimes forget to lock my doors at night and not end up killed by marauding bands?I hate paying taxes as much as the next guy, but when I think about all the ways that the United States has been integral to everything in my life, taxes seem like a tiny price.

Now, remember that the tax rate on long-term capital gains is only 15 percent. In other words, Saverin gets to keep 85 percent of everything he?s making from Facebook?s IPO. Given how much of his wealth depends on the government, that?s more than fair.

Article from here

He paid for his education. Whats that had to do with prostitutes?

I will admit i don't know that much about it but if they lack compassion for human life as most asian countries seem to, them having more power than north america is pretty scary to me.

sounds pretty criminal.

Singapore isn't a dictatorship. They have elections and they are "fair" by international standards.

The amount of logical, epistimological and economic fallacies in that pandodaily article is truly amazing.

YOU OWNED IT IN THIS POST. :thumbsup:thumbsup

you absolutely crushed him it almost hurts. :1orglaugh

Yes, America helped him. But the whole point of being American is you are are a free individual. That means free to choose to live elsewhere and free to choose to no longer be American. This very situation is part of what makes America, America.

So regardless of if people think it is right or wrong, he is a free man. He is an American. This is his right as an American to choose to no longer be an American.


Singapore is one of the most civilized places you'll ever visit. It is not anything like it's surrounding neighbors. It is where wealthy, educated, business minded people live from all regions of the world. However, the do not play games when it comes to punishment. If you fuck up there, it is your ass. But they let you know that out of the gate. It is not a place for criminals or slackers, it is for civilized people. Singapore and Hong Kong are really the two main business hubs in Asia.

South Korea, Kong Kong, and Taiwan are good too. Not as good as Singapore, but they are modern, fair countries.

The other SE Asian countries and China on the other hand... :Oh crap

I'm pretty sure what he and his family have paid in taxes since they got here more than cover the cost of the resources they've used in the time since. Compare that to the percentage of people born in America that will never put back into the system what they've taken out in their lifetime.

Only a sucker would pay into the system and not get some of their own money back, don't you think?