So you’re going away on a trip that will take a century or two. How would the legal institutions cope with this? You can’t be declared dead because you’re coming back, but OTOH you’re not coming back within a normal human lifespan. And what about age restrictions? If you leave at the age of 20 and are away for 200 years but only age 5 years, are you 220 or 25? Then there’s bank accounts, property, etc, etc.
Perhaps we could channel HHGTTG and declare people temporarily dead for tax and other purposes?
I was trying to think of the disadvantages of being considered 220 years old. I guess if you were a citizen of a country that had a forced retirement age, that might suck. Of course, if you were able to set yourself up properly before leaving, money might be no object. Plus, you’d immediately be eligible to collect Social Security and get senior discounts at lots of restaurants.
And people would never stop telling you how good you looked for your age.
Doesn’t seem like legal institutions would have too much trouble with it. You’d need to set up appropriate trusts or delegation to manage any property you wanted to come back to - even if you own land outright, you’ll have to pay property taxes and do upkeep on it, as well as have someone local to answer anything that comes up. Things like bank accounts and stock ownership can work over a long period of time, but with mergers and companies going out of business you’d really want someone keeping an eye on things to make sure nothing gets lost. There’s still some risk that you’d come back to no property.
I’m not aware of any legal precedent for treating age as anything other than ‘you were born in year X, it’s now Y, so you’re Z years old’, so there doesn’t seem to be any complication there. You’d be eligible for social security in the US, for example, but wouldn’t have paid much into the system if you left at 20 so wouldn’t get much of a benefit.
US taxes would be a significant problem if you’re working a job for the aliens, because you’d owe income tax for anything you earn, and handling the accounting would be hard. I don’t think there’s any exemption that would apply to this, and if this was something commonly happening I’d expect the tax code to be modified to handle it seamlessly.
How is tax on foreign earnings of a foreign currency calculated? For instance, if you’re paid in UK pounds, does the US tax a percentage of the pounds, or run some kind of currency exchange calculation and tax you dollars on the supposed dollar value of the pounds?
If the latter, how are they supposed to do that with Aldebaranian Quatloos? How can they assess the value of a truly alien currency that no one on Earth has?
Either the yearly currency exchange rate or the rate on the day that you got the money:
The law is that you have to pay the tax, you would have to come up with an exchange rate and hope they accept it when they audit the returns. You’re making the unfounded assumption that the IRS would have to assess the value in a way that you think is legitimate, but that’s not the way the law works.
Which banking systems have survived relatively unchanged over the last 200 years?
Continuity of accounts, banks and managers would be extremely difficult to predict over that long, especially at a point where our world is going to undergo massive changes (due to ET contact) during and after your departure.
Like the ST:NG episode where the rich guy wakes up a couple hundred years in the future and assumes his wealth management firm is still around. Not likely.
The thing is, the Franklin trust was managed by trustees who were accountable to the cities who expected ultimately to benefit from the trust. As trustees died or retired, the cities could ensure that suitable new trustees were appointed.
But if you head off on a 200-year grand tour, there’ll be nobody left at home with an interest in ensuring that arrangements for the custody and management of your assets keep running. So you need to devise a custody and management arrnangement that you are confident will run more or less indefinitely, with no intervention from any interested party.
Like I said, there’s no legal precedent for distinguishing biological age from calendar age. Running for president is even easier than buying beer, because there isn’t even a regular law about running for president, just a constitutional requirement. Someone would have to get the supreme court to rule on whether you were a valid candidate, and they tend drop such cases for lack of standing or rule in the least restrictive way. (Look at all of the birther stuff that went on during the Obama campaign).
Concerning your property: Couldn’t your enemies (or, failing any enemies, some opportunists) wear away your assets by bringing specious lawsuits and winning them by default?
That’s why you put it into a trust, whoever is managing the trust will then respond to the lawsuit and countersue for it being specious. It’s not just specious lawsuits that would be a problem, over the course of decades there are going to be lots of changes in local government and some things that need response. It’s not even that unlikely that there would be a major government change in the course of two centuries - the US is one of the few countries around that hasn’t had what I’d call a major shift in government in the last two centuries.
Exactly. It’s 1900 and you put your money in a nice stable bank in Germany. Come back in 1910 and your investment looks pretty good. But come back in 1920 after WWI and how does your investment look? Come back in 1930 after the hyperinflation and stock market crash and how does your investment look? Come back in 1940 after the Nazi takeover and how does your investment look? Come back in 1950 after Germany has lost the war and been partitioned and how does your investment look?
It might be unfair to pick Germany as an example due to the turbulent history of the early 20th Century. But pretty much every European country went through similar troubles.
Countries routinely go through currency devaluations, government confiscation of assets, wars, war taxes, land reform, confiscatory taxes, regulation that amounts to confiscation, annual property taxes and fees that destroy your principle, bank failures, stock market crashes, not to mention regular old conmen and swindlers and embezzlers and thieves and fires and earthquakes.
The notion that you can put $1000 into a trust at 5% growth for 200 years and come back and your $1000 is worth $16 million is fantasy. Lots of wealthy families lost their entire fortunes when the guy they entrusted their money to invested it all in some railway company that went bust, and suddenly they’re bankrupt. And that’s with the family right there looking over the shoulder of the money guy. Now imagine that the trustee has nobody keeping him honest except the legal system.
The real answer is that if you’re leaving for 100 years all your assets are almost certainly going to be gone by the time you get back, so you might as well throw a fancy goodbye party instead.
At my work, we relatively recently renewed a 99 year lease … and the renewal looks a lot like the original lease except we’re paying a lot more for the use of the property. So investing in property and then long-term leasing it might be a good strategy.
You could put it into some not perishable commodity like gold or something and then bury it in some secret vault in the desert. Of course there is a risk that someone might break into it or that the commodity is no longer valuable in 200 years.