Democrats' 'Facebook Envy' Tax Hike On Success
Success: Facebook's cultural ascent is a tribute to American innovation and entrepreneurship. But powerful Democrats see its financial success as a chance to fuel popular envy and line the pockets of big government.
Barack Obama and Congress' leading Democrats say Mitt Romney doesn't get it when it comes to the economy.
But the politicized soap opera surrounding Facebook's stock exchange debut last week verifies that it's actually Romney's accusers who don't get it.
Whatever the overhype or trading problems Facebook's $16 billion IPO experienced on Friday, there can be no denying the mobility-geared social network is one of the great success stories in business history.
And as with that unknown teenage pre-med major in the early 1980s named Michael Dell taking apart Apple IIs in his Austin, Texas dorm room, no central planner doling out "investment" money could have found Mark Zuckerberg and his Beantown college roommates in 2003 and realized the website they were designing was the future of popular computing.
Those who did risk their money on Zuckerberg's idea - to the benefit of 900 million people on Facebook - will now be numbered among the evil 1%, as they rake in their just financial rewards. Facebook millionaires will ultimately number in the thousands.
In the case of Brazilian-born Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, "millionaire" grossly understates the $4 billion coming his way. He made the decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship before Facebook's IPO, saving himself $67 million in federal taxes.
Who is the villain, this Bentley-driving titan of 21st century networking, or insatiably greedy Uncle Sam?
Saverin, after all, will still have to cough up a $365 million exit tax before setting down roots in zero-capital gains-tax Singapore.
But that's not enough for greedy, jealous class-war mongers like Democratic Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Robert Casey of Pennsylvania.
"Ex-PATRIOT Act" is the crass name they've given to a bill aimed at "Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy." Their law would double to 30% the capital gains tax on future U.S. investments Saverin and others like him would have to pay, plus bar him from re-entering America.
The U.S., already, is virtually the only country in the world that reaches across the ocean to pick the pockets of its own citizens daring to earn money living abroad - along with the pockets of their non-American spouses.
No wonder the last four years have seen the number of Americans renouncing the highly-prized commodity of U.S. citizenship multiply sevenfold.
Schumer and Casey - and President Obama, who no doubt would gleefully sign such a law - have got it completely backwards.
Instead of condemning a successful American investor for seeking to keep what is his own, they should follow the lead of Singapore, Hong Kong and other places and abolish, rather than double, our capital gains tax.
If Democrats stopped treating successful businesspeople as criminals, America's businesses would be providing a lot more jobs.
