Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

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From the part of the article where the author draws the moral of the story:

> As America descends into the California model of madness and tech-mediated kakistocracy, the smart and adventurous Americans; the kind that found tech companies, or build devilish new weapons for governments, will leave. I know many who have. Virtually everyone I speak to (of course a biased set) is thinking about it. Left wing, right wing: people in tech, military technology, finance, crypto; they see the US heading over the waterfall into madness and want no part of it.

Assuming for a moment that this observation is correct, what are the destinations that the smart and adventurous Americans are leaving to? What places in the world are now the most hospitable and the most rewarding for talent? My naive impression was that Wester European countries are even less agile and enterprising than the US, and anyway, move in lockstep with it. Russia is obviously out. I doubt people are moving to African countries. Nor do I think I heard about an immigration wave into China. And despite Balaji's bullishness on India, I thought net migration is still out of India rather than the other way around. Same with Eastern Europe. So where are these Americans going? Australia? Israel? Singapore?

I've known a few American techies who have set up shop in South Korea and Thailand. The tech scene in Turkey has been, to me, surprisingly active. I've heard distant rumor of people looking at Brazil.

Thailand, Turkey, and Brazil are unfathomably corrupt and less productive countries…taking refuge from the US in these places is weird.

They are also extremely odd choices for people that think the possibility people might boycott them for their political tweets is a threat to their freedom of conscience comparable to Soviet Russia...

I'll add to this...all the cases I personally knew of were in hardware development, as with the notable cases in TFA. I suppose you may evaluate a locale differently for a hardware company than for an Internet startup.

>So where are these Americans going?

Nowhere? Americans are (almost) the only people subject to income tax even on income not made in the US. You'd need to get a very good income to live on two sets of taxes (how unfree for such supposedly free people...)

Which is why Tina Turner died a Swiss citizen.

Not quite true. The US offers a foreign earned income tax credit for incomes up to $120k (in 2022).

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/figu....

That means that for your first $120k earned, if you pay tax on that in your country of residence and meet other criteria, you will not be double taxed by the US.

Two things on this front. The first is a foreign earned income exclusion. The first $120,000 you earn is not taxed. The second is that one can also renounce their citizenship. It's not particularly extreme if you only plan on returning to visit, rather than live in America, and is quite handy not only for avoiding double taxation, but also making it vastly easier to bank abroad.

America has a habit of making laws that it compels other countries to follow, and banking is definitely one of those. Foreign banks dealing with US nationals have a mountain of paperwork, rules, and regulations to abide to the point that US citizenship is often a substantial hurdle to foreign banking. And, as usual, the extremely high wealth types that acts like FATCA [1] ostensibly target have little difficulty finding ways around it. It's the 'normal' people who get hit the hardest.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...

You make renouncing citizenship sound far easier than it is: renouncing US citizenship is irrevocable. You might have elderly relatives you want to look after once they become too frail to look after themselves; you can't do that on recurring tourist visas. You won't be able to see your relatives for extended periods of time.

(plus you still have to pay outstanding taxes, plus an exit fee that goes up substantially if you make a lot of money; plus I'm pretty sure the Swiss median income, for Tina Turner's example, is higher than 120k USD per year so you're always paying taxes)

Chile?

Russia is building a Safe Space for conservatives: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-build-village-catholi...

as a counterargument, every single aerospace engineer I know (a few dozen), mainly in socal, has no plans of ever leaving. in fact, aerospace engineers I know from the UK and europe are dying to move to the US.

I buy that people they spoke to "think" about it, like people saying they were going to leave the US when trump was elected but no mass exodus occurred. it feels like pure fear mongering with people "thinking" or "considering", since that means nothing. The US isn't falling or dying, and even if it was its worth saving rather than running away. they're even spouting misinformation like the USG is preventing people from revoking citizenship because they dont want people to leave, despite the reason this was occuring was because of COVID regulations.

The US is the greatest country in the world, bar none. It has a lot to improve upon and these intelligent people should try their hardest to improve it. this article is anti-american at best and is abundant with conspiracy theories to the point it is noncredible.

Many companies are indeed leaving California [1], and moving to 'friendlier' areas. The same has been true of numerous high income/wealth individuals. If California levies a wealth tax, I'd expect them to accelerate the decline. Norway actually had their own experience with this recently. They decided to slightly raise the wealth tax (which they already had in place) to try to squeeze their highest wealth citizens even more. Enough people left the country that their net tax revenue actually decreased. [2] To stop this, they're now considering trying to pass an 'exit tax' where people who leave the country will be taxed. I'm sure that'll work out great for them. I'd never heard the term kakistocracy before this article, but wow does it fit for much of the world's governance in modern times.

[1] - https://buildremote.co/companies/companies-leaving-californi...

[2] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/04/10/norway-wealt...

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