The U.S. would seem to be the reverse. We don’t much care if anyone not wanted by the law leaves, but . . .
There are a few critical differences you seem to be missing. For one, you couldn’t just leave the USSR in those days, at least not if you were an ordinary citizen. So, a lot of time you were fleeing and seeking asylum in the US or the West, so your possessions were optional. Here, that’s only an issue if you are fleeing from justice (in the form of tax evasion wrt this thread).
Seriously, I don’t see the issue here…nor do I see any sort of comparison between the US today and the old USSR, except that both have a ‘U’ and an ‘S’ in their name.
-XT
You wanna stop being American rather than pay your taxes and still come here? Why would we want your deadbeat ass around? Pass the law, I say. Then we wouldn’t have to wait for the AGs to step up and drum out the chiselers. (Which they haven’t been doing.)
Hundreds of thousands of “ordinary citizens” did leave at the end of 70s. But you were required to leave all you owned behind. IIRC, you were allowed to take about $100 per person with you.
Hey! Just like Saverin. Except, you know, instead of $100 it’s $4,000,000,000.
The poor bastard.
[QUOTE=Terr]
Hundreds of thousands of “ordinary citizens” did leave at the end of 70s. But you were required to leave all you owned behind. IIRC, you were allowed to take about $100 per person with you.
[/QUOTE]
Which is merely another way to prevent or curtail people leaving, which was the whole point. Unlike this, which is simply about someone trying to have cake and eat too, tavorish (in USA cake eat you!). Again, why you seem unable to see the obvious differences is beyond me. It’s not even vaguely similar…which is why pretty much everyone in this thread is rolling their eyes here.
-XT
I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but I’m curious what happened there.
and
Is it too much to ask they make sure this legislation only targets wealthy tax evaders? The last time they changed the law it took nearly a decade to get it cleared up that no they weren’t trying to prevent Billy $30K a year from emigrating.
Pretty interesting reads. I didn’t know any of that, but I don’t know a lot about Soviet history beyond “In Soviet Russia…” jokes. 
Thank you, BTW.
There’s also the “of”.
But you know who else had taxes? Nazi Germany. And Nazi Germany killed millions of Jews. So by the Theory of Pointing At Two Things and Claiming They’re Identical, I now proclaim that income tax is the same as genocide.
You know who else drank water, don’t you? [del] Jesus[/del] [del]Hitler[/del] Stalin.
Commies, the lot of ya!
IIRC, when my parents immigrated in the 1970’s, they were allowed to bring $200 and a couple of suitcases of clothing. I didn’t get the sense that this was a rare condition imposed on emigrants at the time.
Heck, by that point in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, unless one was an aparatchik, oneself, that was probably all most of them owned, to begin with.
Emigrating =! renouncing citizenship.
In order to leave USSR in the 70s you had to renounce citizenship.
Sure, unless you moved somewhere within the Soviet block or were on diplomatic duty or something. Regardless, this is not the case in the US today. Plenty of Americans leave the country and build up a life somewhere else, and none of them have to renounce their citizenship. This is where the analogy fails to hold I think.
Sure, and I have done so.
And yet I’m required to file and pay taxes in a country I no longer live in, have no ties to and take no benefits from. Granted I have not yet hit the exemption threshold, but I could in the next few years. They even require me to list my husband’s income and he is not an American citizen at all. Soon they will even require me to list where I bank, and how much money is in the bank.
I have in moments of pique considered ditching my own citizenship just so I can stop filing the damn forms.
What Saverin is doing is different entirely, but I can totally see why some expats give up their citizenship for tax reasons.
The comparison to the USSR is just silly, though.
He doesn’t want to pay dues, yet he still wants to stay in the club house. No, I don’t think so. If you don’t want to be a member, why should we allow you to stay?
“Hey, you renounced your citizenship, but you want to stay here? Too fucking bad.”
In Soviet America, false equivalence creates you!