New York Times: After welcoming 50 million non-European migrants, Europe is poor and needs more government spending

by philg

“Europe’s ‘Reason for Being’ at Risk as Competitiveness Wanes, Report Warns” (New York Times, 9/9/2024):

Europe must increase public investment by nearly $900 billion a year in sectors like technology and defense, according to a long-awaited report published Monday in response to growing anxieties about the continent’s economy lagging behind that of the United States and China.

Mr. Draghi said that the European Union needed additional annual investment of up to 800 billion euros ($884 billion) to meet the objectives he laid out in his report. That is equivalent to about 4.5 percent of the European Union’s gross domestic product last year. By comparison, investment under the Marshall Plan from 1948 to 1951 was equivalent to about 1.5 percent of Europe’s economic output.

Conditions that contributed to the continent’s prosperity have changed substantially since the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Cheap Russian gas is no longer available, and energy prices have soared. Those prices have come off their peak, but European companies still pay two to three times more for electricity than U.S. companies, the report found.

We are informed that low-skill migrants make developed countries rich. Europe has welcomed nearly 50 million non-European migrants (source through 2020).

Why does Europe need more government spending, as a percentage of GDP, to become rich if it was already enriched by low-skill migrants?

Related:

  • “Our giant welfare state” (Washington Post, 2014), in which we learn that only the French spend a larger percentage of their GDP on government hand-outs
  • Heritage Foundation on Germany, finding that it spends 50 percent of GDP on government (higher than the U.S., but the U.S. percentage is distorted because we don’t include nominally “private” spending on health care (which is so regulated and mandated by the government that I think it should be included))
  • Heritage on France (60 percent of GDP spent by the government)
  • Heritage on Poland (45 percent of GDP spent by the government)
  • Heritage on Taiwan (18 percent of GDP spent by the government (and 82 percent by TSMC?))
  • Heritage on South Korea (26 percent of GDP spent by the government)
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Back to school at Brown University

by philg

We’ve got a mole inside Brown this year. Here’s “Clouseau’s” report on how freshman year started… (not in quote style for readability):

Before classes began, all students were required to read an 86 page report on Brown’s relationship with slavery (TLDR: Slavery was bad and institutions founded 100+ years before the Civil War have connections to it) and attend a seminar discussing it. We have a responsibility to “center discussions of identity” in all disciplines.

During the seminar, the facilitator (a humanities professor) and my fellow students spent 80 minutes hammering Brown and the Antebellum North for their profiteering relationship with slavery, and the group was adamant that they would not have similarly stood by had they been on campus in 1850. The group concluded that the Complicit North eventually fighting a war to end slavery was “largely performative” with respect to combatting the practice.

One place the group did passionately feel Brown was repeating its past mistakes was by refusing to divest from Israel despite the “genocide” (facilitator’s phrasing) in Gaza. Everyone agreed that we had to “free Palestine” — and hundreds of students waved Palestinian flags at the opening convocation this afternoon to emphasize the point. Ironically, 40% of Brown students say they are [2SLGBTQQIA+; our mole hatefully neglected some of these letters]; I guess what happens to members of that community under Hamas does not qualify as genocide.

Anyway, classes start tomorrow. My [STEM class with more than 100 students] has already mandated we use “they/them” pronouns for all students.

[Aerial photo by Tony Cammarata. June 2020 from a Robinson R44 helicopter. Campus shut down for coronapanic.]

  • 4:02 PM Convocation begins
  • 4:03 PM National Anthem
  • 4:04 PM Acknowledgment that we are on stolen Narragansett land

Questions that were not answered:

  • Why are we singing the anthem of a country that is a product of theft?
  • Who had the land before the Narragansett? Was it light, heaven and earth, animals, and then thousands of years of Narragansett rule before the settler-colonialist Rhode Islanders came along?
  • What is being done to return the stolen land? Why is the school actively buying up more instead of giving it back?
  • If the majority of students identify as progressive, why were they chatting through the land acknowledgement, to the point that it was difficult to hear the speaker?

Separately, a friend’s daughter has been keeping up with friends from high school. Her friend who recently matriculated at Northeastern University’s London campus (5 percent acceptance rate) has been going to clubs… every night. Since there are no neutrally administered tests with unbiased grading (i.e., the professors grade their own students), there is no need to study. Her friend who has been at Fordham for three weeks has already had sex with three different men, which reminds me of a conversation I had with an MIT undergraduette circa 1990. She mentioned that her freshman year roommate had sex with 25 different men. I pointed out that “MIT is in session for only 26 weeks per year.” She responded, “She had a cold one week.”

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The Harris unrealized capital gains tax and Bidenflation

by philg

The Democrats’ latest tax schemes, recently highlighted by Kamala Harris, include collecting tax on unrealized capital gains. To me, one of the strangest things about the US tax system is that losses are taxed as capital gains so long as there is even the slightest amount of inflation. For example, if you bought a stock in January 2021 for $100 and sold it today for $110 more you’d have about $10 in today’s dollars terms under official CPI and closer to $80 if adjusted for house purchasing power (Zillow). Despite the loss on what turned out to be an unsuccessful investment, you’d owe federal and, perhaps, state tax on the sale. The current not-adjusted-for-inflation capital gains tax regime is, thus, rather cruel when combined with Bidenflation but at least you can choose when to pay the tax on your fictitious profit/real loss.

Related:

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Changing Perceptions of Jihad in New York City

by philg

It’s the 23rd anniversary of 9/11, described by Wikipedia as “Islamist terrorist suicide attacks”, and the first 9/11 anniversary since soldiers of the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad invaded Israel (October 7, 2023).

At least on September 12, 2001, nearly everyone in the New York metro area apparently believed that jihad was bad. It is tough to find a statistic on how many Muslims lived in NYC in 2001, but at least their leadership came out against attacking civilians: “No political cause could ever be assisted by such immoral acts.” (Wikipedia).

Today, there are “1.5 million Muslims in the greater New York metropolitan area” (Wikipedia). Together with progressive Democrats (“Queers for Palestine”), at least some of these New Yorkers now say that attacking civilians as part of an “Islamic Resistance Movement” or “Islamic Jihad” is praiseworthy. “Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters — including A-list actress — shout ‘Long live the Intifada!’, pass out maps of pro-Israel locations to target in NYC” (New York Post, November 17, 2023):

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered at Union Square Friday – before joining another massive rally near Bryant Park and marching to locations listed on a troubling map that called for “direct action” to “globalize intifada.”

By early Friday evening, the crowd made at least five stops in Manhattan that the Palestinian-led community organization Within Our Lifetime called for followers to target in a since-deleted social media post Thursday.

Outside The New York Times building, one enraged protester holding a Palestinian flag appeared to say “Bomb the New York Times. Bomb the New York Times!”

Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon was in attendance and donned a playful Simpsons-themed bomber jacket to the protest, which also called out politicians by name.

She joined the crowd in chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – which is largely regarded as an antisemitic slogan that implies the decimation of Israel – before addressing the group herself.

“There are a lot of people that are afraid, that are afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country,” she said.

Some of the protesters held a banner that read “By any means necessary” – seemingly implying that Palestine should be freed at all costs, even violence.

The “by any means necessary” slogan presumably includes attacks on Israeli civilians, as featured on October 7, 2023 and, since at least 2001, via rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon (the rockets are generally targeted at cities, such as Tel Aviv). “By any means necessary” also includes, much to my surprise, taking and holding fellow Muslims hostage.

How widespread has the support for killing Israeli civilians been? As of November 17, 2023:

The Union Square event is one of hundreds of similar gatherings that took place in New York City and beyond this week, as tensions continue to simmer in the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 sneak attack on southern Israel and Israel’s subsequent retaliatory bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

Uptown at Columbia (France24):

At least New York City, therefore, has been transformed in just 23 years from a place where jihad is condemned to a place where jihad is celebrated. What would New Yorkers do today if a jihad were waged against civilian New Yorkers (targeted in some way so as not to affect Muslim New Yorkers) to “stop the genocide”, for example?

Associated Press video: “Palestinian men, women and children chanted in jubilation after terrorists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center causing them to collapse on Tuesday morning.”

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New York Times features an expert on parenting…

by philg

… who has never been a parent.

“I Love the Kids in My Life. And I’m Raising None of Them.” (Glynnis MacNicol, NYT, 9/7/2024):

I have no children of my own…

In America, there is a persistent, pernicious belief that the only way to be invested in a child’s life is to be a parent — and, for women, to give birth to that child. (Ella and Cole Emhoff, among others, would like a word.) In a country that offers so little support to parents, this often feels like a not-so-covert argument for taking women back to a time when they lacked control over their bodies and their finances.

To understand the extraordinary commitment it takes to parent — because you see it firsthand — and decide to direct your own time elsewhere…

If he/she/ze/they has never been a parent, how can he/she/ze/they be sure that he/she/ze/they “understand” anything about being a parent?

Separately, I love that the editors allow “a country that offers so little support to parents” to be presented as a statement of fact. The U.S. provides 13 years of free education/daycare to parents who don’t want to deal with their kids. The U.S. also provides taxpayer-funded breakfast and lunch at school for parents who choose to not work or, as in Palm Beach County, to all parents. The U.S. forces the childless to work longer hours and pay higher taxes to subsidize parents with lower tax rates. The childless are even forced, under threat of imprisonment, to pay taxes to subsidize college and, new with the Biden-Harris administration, loan “forgiveness” (transfer to the general taxpayer). How is that “little support”? What more could the childless do for us parents? Buy us a new Honda Odyssey or Toyota Sienna every 3 years?

Circling back to the main theme, we’re informed that we should defer to experts selected by the legacy media and not commit the sin of “doing our own research”. And it turns out that the NYT-selected expert on parenting has some experience… as a babysitter.

Here’s the author in 2018 (a childless cat lady with no cats?):

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Is the camera on the iPhone 16 Pro different from the camera on the iPhone 15 Pro?

by philg

Almost as exciting to progressives as a new COVID-19 vaccine… Apple has announced the iPhone 16 (two cameras/lenses) and iPhone 16 Pro (three cameras/lenses).

For us photo nerds, plainly, the 16 Pro is the only device of interest. I can’t figure out what’s different, though. Here’s what Apple says:

With iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, the world’s favorite camera gets even more powerful. Powered by A18 Pro, the upgraded camera system introduces a new 48MP Fusion camera with a faster, more efficient quad-pixel sensor and Apple Camera Interface, unlocking 4K120 fps video recording in Dolby Vision — the highest resolution and frame-rate combination ever available on iPhone, and a smartphone first. The quad-pixel sensor can read data 2x faster, enabling zero shutter lag for 48MP ProRAW or HEIF photos. A new 48MP Ultra Wide camera also features a quad-pixel sensor with autofocus, so users can take higher-resolution 48MP ProRAW and HEIF images when capturing uniquely framed, wider-angle shots or getting close to their subjects with macro photography. The powerful 5x Telephoto camera now comes on both iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, allowing users to catch the action from farther away, no matter which model they choose. iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max now take spatial photos in addition to videos to help users relive memories with remarkable depth on Apple Vision Pro.

For still photography, it sounds as though maybe the wide angle camera will yield higher resolution results (but is the lens good enough for that to matter?).

There is some new camera software, which makes the phone work more like a legacy DSLR:

Camera Control — a result of thoughtful hardware and software integration — makes the pro camera system more versatile with an innovative new way to quickly launch the camera, take a photo, and start video recording. It has a tactile switch that powers the click experience, a high-precision force sensor that enables the light press gesture, and a capacitive sensor that allows for touch interactions. A new camera preview helps users frame the shot and adjust other control options — such as zoom, exposure, or depth of field — to compose a stunning photo or video by sliding their finger on the Camera Control. Later this fall, Camera Control will be updated with a two-stage shutter to automatically lock focus and exposure on a subject with a light press, letting users reframe the shot without losing focus. Additionally, developers will be able to bring Camera Control to third-party apps such as Kino, which will offer users the ability to adjust white balance and set focus points, including at various levels of depth in their scene.

But maybe this will also work with older iPhones?

The company claims that they’re going to automatically generate blather suitable for emailing (“Built for Apple Intelligence”), but there is no evidence that they’ve tackled the “fill out a shopping/shipping form” challenge.

I guess I will buy one to replace my iPhone 14 Pro Max (recently failed and required a $219 new camera module at the Palm Beach Gardens, Florida Apple Store (a model of customer service, I have to admit!)), if only to enter the glorious USB-C era that Android users entered 10 years ago and to lord it over Android users (“I have AI and you have nothing”).

What’s a good example of a recent photo that I couldn’t have taken without the cameraphone? Here’s one from Costco that can be captioned “Starlink is everywhere”:

And here’s the Big Bang Bar pinball machine, one of about 200 made, at the Delray Beach Silverball Museum:

It’s unlikely I would have carried a serious camera into these situations, so here’s a shout-out to the engineers at Kyocera who pioneered the camera phone in May 1999 (eight years before Apple released the iPhone).

Related:

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A Massachusetts Kamala voter solves what she perceives as the “Israel-Palestine Problem”

by philg

We walked to a friend from Maskachusetts shortly after the noble Gazans made the news for amputating a young American citizen’s arm, holding him hostage for 11 months, and then executing him shortly before he would have been rescued by the IDF. Hersh Goldberg-Polin was 23 years old, was not serving in the Israeli military, and “was reportedly working with an initiative that was using soccer to bring Israeli and Palestinian children together” (Wikipedia).

As with other Democrats, the murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin did not dampen her enthusiasm for voting for Kamala Harris, who has pledged to continue funding Hamas (via UNRWA, a funding path that Donald Trump cut off and Joe Biden restored in 2021; unless the October 7 attacks cost more than $1 billion it is fair to say that the Biden-Harris administration funded 100 percent of it with our tax dollars). She did volunteer her belief that there was an urgent need to “solve the Israel-Palestine Problem”. I asked her why the Maskachusetts Righteous sympathies were there rather than with Black Lives Matter or American Women, two victimhood classes that had previously generated large rallies. She said that Democrats were still passionate about these causes, but couldn’t remember any BLM events post-October 7, 2023. I asked why the failure of the Palestinians to achieve their 1948 military goals made them more sympathy-worthy than any of the 1.5 billion residents of Africa, about whom she had never expressed any concern. She said, “I guess I hear more about the Palestinians in the news.”

What was her plan for resolving the conflict? She believed that Palestinian children were being indoctrinated by a message of Jew-/Israel-hatred in their schools (funded by US and EU taxpayers, of course) and that the solution was to bring them to the U.S. so that they could instead be indoctrinated by American schools (also funded by US taxpayers so perhaps this isn’t a huge change from a financial point of view). I didn’t point out that Queers for Palestine and similar rallies all around the U.S. show that there is plenty of “destroy Israel” energy among those who go through American K-12, but I did ask “Why would the typical Palestinian go to the trouble of having 5 kids and then just give them up voluntarily to American do-gooders running a reeducation scheme in which Christianity and Judaism have equal status to Islam?” Our Massachusetts Kamala voter said, “the parents can come too if they want.” I pointed out that, given Gaza’s world-leading population growth rate, almost every adult there has at least one minor child and, therefore, she was proposing that the entire population of Gaza be admitted to the United States to become American citizens. She said that it was indeed her expectation that the majority of Gazans would come to the U.S. I then pointed out that 50,000 babies had been born in Gaza during the recent battles (not to say “war” since that started in 1948 and the Palestinians have never accepted any kind of peace; there has been a continuous officially declared war going for 76 years now). Wouldn’t a new crop of Hamas warriors, therefore, be born soon enough and be able to carry on the fight even if most of their older brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters were peacefully voting for Democrats in Michigan? She didn’t seem to have considered the possibility that Gazans left behind, still getting unlimited food, education, health care, etc. free from UNRWA, would continue the Palestinian tradition of off-the-charts fertility. (See “Reproductive decisions in the lives of West Bank Palestinian women: Dimensions and contradictions” (2017, Global Public Health):

Palestinian women have one of the highest fertility rates in the world, averaging 4.38 births per woman. However, Palestinian fertility patterns are distinct from those of other developing nations, in that high fertility rates coexist alongside high levels of education and low levels of infant mortality – both of which have been established elsewhere as predictors of low total fertility rates.

).

I share this conversation because I thought it was an interesting window into the mind of a Kamala Harris voter. The best way to heal the world is a further expansion of low-skill immigration to the U.S.

Separately, given the success that Hamas has enjoyed after taking and killing American hostages what happens to U.S. citizens in other parts of the world going forward? Since taking American hostages Hamas has secured from the Biden-Harris administration (a) promises of continued funding, (b) a $230 million pier (admittedly washed away quickly), (c) support for the Hamas-sought “permanent ceasefire” that leaves Hamas leaders alive and well and permanently in charge of Gaza, (d) pressure on Israel for a long delay in the IDF operation in Rafah, which turns out to be where at least one American hostage was held and killed (see “Harris warns it would be a ‘mistake’ for Israel to invade Rafah” (CNN, March 25, 2024)) and “Kamala Harris says Israel assault on Rafah ‘would be a huge mistake’” (Guardian)), and (e) diplomatic recognition by a variety of purported U.S. allies and military client states as leaders of their own sovereign nation (“Spain, Norway and Ireland formally recognize a Palestinian state as EU rift with Israel widens” (AP)). What’s the downside to taking American hostages in the Biden-Harris era?

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How are Brazilians doing now that they’ve eliminated the biggest threat to their democracy?

by philg

Here’s Jair Bolsonaro, characterized by media elites as “far right”, “authoritarian”, and “a threat to democracy”, in 2023 (from “Exiled Bolsonaro lives it up in Florida as legal woes grow back home” (Guardian)):

The Brazilian masses responded to elite advice and voted to preserve their democracy (50.9:49.1), but the threat wasn’t completely extinguished. “The Big Lie Is Going Global. We Saw It in Brazil.” (New York Times, November 14, 2022), for example:

Donald Trump’s playbook of poisoning the polity with misinformation … is being exported and deployed beyond the United States and becoming a transnational threat to democracy.

Mr. Trump’s methods were energetically adopted in Brazil by his authoritarian, right-wing friend Jair Bolsonaro, who pushed misinformation during his presidency, seeded distrust in the electoral system for years and, eventually, tried to discredit the electoral process in Brazil after losing the presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last month.

It’s bad enough when a threat to democracy speaks and even worse when he/she/ze/they doesn’t speak:

For more than 44 hours after his electoral defeat, Mr. Bolsonaro maintained a dangerous silence

So long as the government does not control all media and social media, democracy is unsafe:

The attempts of Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters to create uncertainty about Brazil’s future could be the new global norm as would-be autocrats are embracing the Big Lie as a legitimate political strategy.

NYT, today, “How Brazil’s Experiment Fighting Fake News Led to a Ban on X”:

To combat disinformation, Brazil gave one judge broad power to police the internet.

That justice, Alexandre de Moraes, has since carried out an aggressive campaign to clean up his country’s internet, forcing social networks to pull down thousands of posts, often giving them a deadline of just hours to comply.

It has been one of the most comprehensive — and, in some ways, most effective — efforts to combat the scourge of internet falsehoods.

When his online crackdown helped stifle far-right efforts to overturn Brazil’s election, academics and commentators wondered whether the nation had found a possible solution to one of the most vexing problems of modern democracy.

Then, on Friday, Justice Moraes blocked the social network X across Brazil because its owner, Elon Musk, had ignored his court orders to remove accounts. As part of the blackout order, the judge said internet users who tried to circumvent his measure in order to keep using X could be fined nearly $9,000 a day, or more than what the average Brazilian makes a year.

Justice Moraes has continued to use the threat to democracy as a justification for his actions. In his order on Friday, he said Mr. Musk’s refusal to comply with orders to suspend accounts “represents an extremely serious risk to the municipal elections in October” in Brazil.

How else are Brazilians being protected from threats to their democracy? The current government has the opposition leader more or less under house arrest: “Brazil’s Bolsonaro must hand in his passport for coup investigation” (state-sponsored NPR, February 2024). Brazil is on the right side of history, according to the best minds of Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley: “Brazil president withdraws his ambassador to Israel after criticizing the war in Gaza” (state-sponsored PBS, May 2024; “Lula has been a frequent critic of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which he compared to the Holocaust earlier this year.”). [Note that the “Holocaust” is being exacerbated by a population explosion.]

Some additional warnings that Brazilian voters heeded:

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NASA at Oshkosh (saving our planet with plastic bags)

by philg

From nasa.gov:

The NASA pavilion at EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) 2024:

(These are the plastic bags that are good for the environment?)

What else was going on? NASA arranged to have a Boeing Starliner parked in front:

The NISAR mission was featured. This was supposed to be launched in January 2022 and will supposedly be able to measure displacements of parts of Earth’s surface as small as 3.5 mm. I’m not sure if this includes vertical displacement, e.g., to see whether sea levels are indeed rising to the point that owners of multi-$billion lower Manhattan and Boston real estate portfolios need to be bailed out by taxpayers in the Midwest. The satellite will supposedly be able to watch glaciers and ice sheets moving. I don’t think that it can measure sea level directly because the Science Users’ Handbook says “Provide observations of relative sea level rise from melting land ice and land subsidence.” How many migrants could have been housed for the cost of this mission? “NISAR launch slips to 2025” (July 29, 2024) says “with NASA alone spending more than $1 billion in formulation and development of the mission”. Taxpayers spend about $200,000 per year per migrant family welcomed in New York ($140k/year for food and housing and then let’s assume another $60,000/year for health care and other benefits). So if we hadn’t spent money on NISAR we could have supported 1,000 additional migrant families for five years.

NASA was also featuring the X-66, a collaboration with Boeing on an airliner that could possibly cut fuel burn by 30 percent, mostly via high aspect ratio wings (as you might see on a glider). We’re in a “climate crisis” according to our ablest minds, e.g., Kamala Harris, and “communities of color are often the hardest hit”. When will communities of color see some relief from the X-66? NASA says that if everything goes perfect the X-66 might get into the air as soon as 2028 and then, in the year 2050, we’ll be in a net-zero phase for aviation. The United Nations forecasts that world population will grow to approximately 10 billion by 2050. So we’ll have more people taking more trips, mostly in planes that were built to current designs, and the result will be much less environmental impact.

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Unrealized capital gains are already taxed by the federal government…

by philg

… for those who renounce U.S. citizenship.

There has been a bit of an uproar regarding the Democrats’ plan to tax unrealized capital gains and Republicans are complaining that it is an unprecedented new area for the federal government. But this isn’t a new area, at least when it comes to Americans who decide that they’re never going to pay U.S. taxes again. The IRS web page regarding the expatriation tax:

IRC 877A imposes a mark-to-market regime, which generally means that all property of a covered expatriate is deemed sold for its fair market value on the day before the expatriation date. Any gain arising from the deemed sale is taken into account for the tax year of the deemed sale notwithstanding any other provisions of the Code. Any loss from the deemed sale is taken into account for the tax year of the deemed sale to the extent otherwise provided in the Code, except that the wash sale rules of IRC 1091 do not apply.

And a detail page:

Section 877A(a) generally imposes a mark-to-market regime on expatriates who are covered by section 877A, providing that all property of a covered expatriate is treated as sold on the day before the expatriation date for its fair market value.

For purposes of the mark-to-market regime, the covered expatriate is deemed to have sold any interest in property that he or she is considered to own under the rules of this paragraph other than property described in section 877A(c). For purposes of computing the tax liability under the mark-to-market regime, a covered expatriate is considered to own any interest in property that would be taxable as part of his or her gross estate for Federal estate tax purposes under Chapter 11 of Subtitle B of the Code as if he or she had died on the day before the expatriation date as a citizen or resident of the United States.

In computing the tax liability under the mark-to-market regime, a covered expatriate must use the fair market value of each interest in property as of the day before the expatriation date in accordance with the valuation principles applicable for purposes of the Federal estate tax, except as otherwise provided in this paragraph.

How often does this happen? “IRS steps up enforcement of the individual expatriation tax” (KPMG partner; June 2024):

The number of individuals who renounce their U.S. citizenship or terminate their green card status has increased significantly since the enactment of the current expatriation tax regime in 2008. Lists of these individuals published quarterly by the IRS in the Federal Register show that the number of individuals expatriating has increased from 312 in 2008 to 3,260 in 2023, with a peak of 6,705 in 2020.

My big question is how President Kamala Harris will collect long-term money from the targets of her extended (not exactly new, as noted above) unrealized capital gains tax. A person targeted by the tax has two choices:

  1. pay President Harris for unrealized capital gains in 2026 (let’s assume it takes a while for this to be implemented), 2027, 2028, and every subsequent year until death
  2. pay President Harris for unrealized capital gains at long-term rates in 2025 and then never pay income taxes to President Harris, the U.S. government, or any other government again (expatriation)

Why wouldn’t a rational target of the new tax choose Option 2? He/she/ze/they renounces U.S. citizenship, moves his/her/zir/their assets into an offshore Dutch trust (as U2 did) and moves to any country that doesn’t dig into offshore assets/income for computing income tax. Or establish a residence in Italy and pay a flat tax rate of €200,000 a year (recently bumped up from the €100,000/year rate established in 2017, which means it has kept roughly even after adjusting for inflation in the costs of things that rich people buy, but the bump doesn’t affect people who signed up for this prior to August 2024). Or simply move to a country that doesn’t impose any income tax (KMPG on relocation to Monaco). If the expat is nostalgic, he/she/ze/they can return to the US for 30-60 days per year, depending on the employment situation, without becoming subject to U.S. taxation.

There is a lot to like about living in the U.S. (especially here in Florida!), but is it worth paying 100X as much in taxes compared to living in some other part of the world? If there are friends you want to see buy them a first class ticket to Heathrow and push your way through the pro-Hamas rallies to a night of theater. Or, if you’re truly one of those who has taken more than he/she/ze/they needs, send the Gulfstream or Airbus Corporate Jet to pick up the friends.

Here’s a place in northern Italy that costs less than a tract house in Palm Beach County ($2.7 million for a modern house on 22 acres):

If you don’t mind a little maintenance, a castle in Sicily on 7 acres:

Given the tax savings, maybe there isn’t any need for maintenance. Just buy a new house every few years with a fraction of what would have been paid in unrealized capital gains tax and give the old house to a charity.

Separately, why didn’t the Democrats impose their new tax regime during the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration when they had control of both houses of Congress and the White House? How can Kamala Harris simultaneously say that she agrees with everything that Joe Biden did (or read from a teleprompter) and also that she will do completely different stuff starting January 2025?

Related:

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