These resources are called tax lawyers, and they are very expensive. The knowledge required to do this is very specialized and guarded with extreme zeal by its possessors. As is usual in any situation involving government regulation, the biggest winners are the lawyers. If you want to get an idea of how complex and draconian these things really are, try looking up PFIC and "controlled foreign corporation".
Maybe Obama will be smart enough to start handing out green cards to anybody with an H1B who can hold a permanent position for two years. I'd much rather employ somebody who's motivated enough to leave their home country in search of opportunity.
Obama will be painted as weak-on-immigration by the right regardless. So there's no up-side to him ignoring the larger immigration problem or H1B in particular.
(H1B should be a short path to a green card. Letting them be taken advantage of and then sending them home is a bad policy.)
In the long run, one might suspect that it helps most workers (being part of the economy in general) to have a larger pool of skilled labor doing productive work.
It's unlikely. Most democrats oppose this (protectionism) and many republicans oppose it as well (anti-immigration stance). It's lose-lose for immigrants.
Regardless of whether politicians "support" it, I expect that most of them know that it's really good for the country in the long term. That's why I said that I hope Obama, who's been all about change, will have the brains (and the balls) to actually do the right thing.
It seems likely that there are multiple effects here. Perhaps work has become skilled enough to produce large enough differences in productivity that it necessitates an adjustment to the model. This might help explain why the recent recessions were considered fairly jobless relative to those that came before. It might also help in explaining the increasing compensation gap that we see.
It may also be the case that businesses are delevering in the same way that households must. This would be a rational reaction to the dangers of debt financing that have been placed in stark relief by the crisis. Businesses that are reducing their dependency on debt by switching to internal financing will have less capital available for expansion.
The rising cost of benefits may have also started to effect the demand for full time workers and pushed businesses over into hiring temps and part timers.
There may be some wisdom, but not a whole lot. Hiring on referrals is based on the idea that people will not refer idiots to you for fear of depleting their social capital, providing you with a fairly strong selection mechanism for talented candidates. Being forced to hire the relatives of your mate regardless of their skills does not strike me as very beneficial.
Hiring on referrals is tricky. It's like what Steve Jobs and Joel Spolsky have said. The A ppl hire the A ppl but the B ppl hire the C ppl. So yes, it's less than ideal when you can be already be reasonably certain that credentials mean something (i.e. someone with a degree in chemical engineering is at least halfway capable of maintaining a part of a chemical plant), or you can look at things like what sort of papers they've published, what OSS projects they've contributed to, etc.
As for the hiring relatives regardless of their skill... this matters when skill really matters. When you're in a winner-takes-all field like finance or tech, it can be very much less than ideal and we myopically don't recognize that the rest of the world gets on without being exceptional at problem solving.
The flip side to the hiring relatives bit is that native-born Chinese are generally able to extract higher loyalty and work ethic from their relatives because of these same bonds. There is the feeling that you are all together.
So for all the talk of China steamrolling the world, I just don't believe it. You have to look at what benefits and costs this sort of culture provides. You get high societal stability, and a caring family that will support you, but one that can in some ways hold you back as well. Their societal structure may have worked extraordinarily well with manufacturing, but tech? I refuse to ever say that someone, or some group can't do X, however I will say the jury is still out on this one.
And the implication here is that the other industrialized nations are free-riders on development costs paid by the Americans and would probably need to pay more in their markets.
Has anybody seen any research on how much of the difference between health care costs in the US and Canada/Europe are accounted for by the difference in drug prices?
I also expect that international cooperation on the approval process for new drugs might reduce development costs. Perhaps the UN might actually make itself useful and form something like an international version of the FDA and have member nations agree to abide by its decisions.
One thing that you must keep in mind is that if you get sick of high US taxes (and they only seem to be going higher) and you want to move someplace like Hong Kong, you will still need to pay US taxes, and you will even be forced to continue to pay them for 10 years if you decide to give up your citizenship.
I am a naturalized U.S. citizen and I wouldn't even dream of "ditching" my identity for tax purposes and moving overseas. I am currently in Australia, I lived both in Singapore and Hong Kong, and I don't think I could ever call either of them "home" (Oz rocks, but only as friends ;-)
There is more to it than utility, and I know that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel", but FUCK man, America is HOME.
You might not realize it now, but I dare you to travel overseas and try to unbecome a yank. It's hard. Everday, I miss my proud state of Virginia when I pay the Australian equivalent of $10USD for a pack of cigarettes; back home it was $4 for Marlies. Small things will get to you. My bank closed at 7PM and was open 7 days a week; I dare you to find such business ethic anywhere else on earth. And Oh, I could grab a case from any 7/11 or grocery store.
I just enjoy the fact that I can speak ill of any politician, critique the laws of the country and generally be resentful of "society" without anybody feeling offended. Everywhere else it's "Love it or leave it"; back home it's "tough luck". I like that sense of pesimistic resignation to fate and being "stuck" with that mess of a big fat country I call home.
Death to America! or at least the parts of it I haven't been to :-P
[Edit: Ok, maybe just "death to Jersey" .. specially Clifton and other areas just south of the "Bridge and the Tunnel" where my car was once levitated on four bricks. Pricks!]
I am a US citizen as well and I agree that the thought of ditching my identity for tax purposes is very painful, but the American political system seems to become ever more broken. I've been living in Hong Kong for the past few months after nearly 10 years in New York City and my experience has been a real eye opener. I can't see any real difference in the quality of life here (this is an expat's experience, so take that with a grain of salt), but it is achieved at a significantly lower tax burden, like less than half. I have health insurance that doesn't break the bank, the mass transit system is clean and efficient, they have well-maintained public parks, etc. As someone who works hard and earns well, my freedom to criticize the government hasn't stopped me from being viewed as a piggy bank by elected officials who haven't learned the real lesson of the financial crisis, which is to live within your means. They're taking on yet another helping of the "borrow and spend" habit that the homeowners had to give up, and it seems to me that it's all going to end in tears at some point. Frankly I don't really want to be among the ones who has to pay for it down the road. The final freedom is the freedom to vote with your feet, which is what made the iron curtain such a horrible crime against human rights, and while I still have that freedom, they want me to leave my wallet at the door, unlike almost every other developed country.
However, you are an expat and thus subject to the whims of your host country without the recourse of a citizen to expect response to complaints (of course, that expectation varies widely from country to country and within a country). For example, Thailand occasionally tinkers with their visa rules and fees - as an expat you're at their mercy.
He can also open a UBS account by himself, as anybody fortunate enough to live the American Dream. Experimentally proven.
Le Liechtenstein Paradis Fiscal DOC FRENCH PDTV XViD
(Allemagne, 2008, 52mn)
ZDF
Réalisateur: Ulrich Stoll, Herbert Klar
Auteur: Herbert Klar
Plus largement, l'enquête menée par les auteurs de ce documentaire, tourné en partie en caméra cachée, montre comment nombre d'Allemands fortunés ont su mettre à profit le manque de transparence des établissements bancaires installés dans cette petite principauté nichée entre la Suisse et l'Autriche.
Both have had moments of awesome brilliance. Both have been slowly ground into the dirt by writers with no exciting new ideas who have gone to the well too many times and finally sucked it dry.
Why are we still talking about proliferation? Proliferation has already happened: Pakistan has the bomb, North Korea has the bomb, Iran is probably building one. We were only ever going to delay the inevitable, once you prove that it can be done, it's only a matter of time before technology brings the price of doing it down to a level that less wealthy nations can afford. There may be other reasons why we shouldn't reprocess fuel, but proliferation isn't one of them.
No, the point is that unhedged systemic risk is only one component of the crisis, despite what the rest of the media is blaring. The other, and perhaps more important, component was zero down mortgages and cash-out refinancings that left borrowers with no equity in their houses. Borrowers were just as irresponsible as bankers and haven't gotten the bad press they deserve. "It's the leverage, stupid" should be the mantra of this crisis.
It's an example of moral hazard. How much is your pristine credit rating worth? If your house is under water by $100K maybe it's worth taking a hit -- it may be easier to rebuild your credit rating over five years than to repay $100K.
The borrower never has been and never should be the party to determine if they can repay a loan or if the assets being leveraged will retain their value through the life of the loan. This is the job of the lender. Yes, it was "irresponsible" for people to borrow so much, but the burden goes to the lender...and the regulators that allowed the lenders to behave that way...and the people that voted for elected officials that enabled regulators to do what they did.
In short, if you make money so freely available, you can expect people to take it.
Ironically, the borrowers just acted according to incentives, as did bankers. Everyone knew fannie/freddie would get bailed out if mortgages went south, and this fact drastically reduced anyone's incentive to care about how risky MBSs were.
There is moral hazard created by the way bankruptcy law works (for people who are significantly underwater) and also in banking regulations (and GSEs).
People always behave the way they're incentivized (unless it's egregiously immoral).
I've always found it pretty easy to predict the eventualities of markets based on how the system works. You can't predict the twists and turns along the way, but you usually know what the end looks like. Sadly though, not when.
The problem at this point is not responsibility but liability.
Lenders and folks who bought securitized loans have taken a huge hit. (I'd agree that they haven't taken enough of a hit, they were going to keep the profits so they should take the losses, and if they didn't know what they were doing....)
Meanwhile, we're spending money to keep folks in houses that they never could afford instead of letting those houses go to folks who stayed within their means. And, by "we", I mean said "stay within their means" folks.
I agree with you. but...a home is not a share of stock. Everyone needs a roof over their head. Giving the houses to people that stayed within their means doesn't solve the problem of keeping everyone in a home. In short, you shouldn't treat houses the same as we treat stocks.
