Eduardo Saverin

National citizenship seems to be a headliner this week; first with Michele Bachmann renouncing the wrong one and now with the guy in The Social Network played by the new Spider-Man saying "it's been real" to America and going back to Brazil, presumably so he won't hafta pay as much taxes after the Facebook IPO.  You'd think some foreigner coming here, taking someone else's job and then telling America to go fuck itself would be frowned upon, but of course HERE we find taking his ball and going home makes him a hero to the Right:

Saverin’s departure is also a reminder to politicians that while they can obnoxiously decree what percentage of our income we’ll hand them in taxes, what they vote for won’t necessarily reflect reality. Indeed, as evidenced by Saverin’s renunciation, tax rates and collection of monies on those rates are two different things. Assuming nosebleed rates of taxation were a driver of Saverin’s decision, politicians will hopefully see that if too greedy about collecting the money of others, they’ll eventually collect nothing.

More interestingly, THIS GUY HERE points out that were it not for the US government's many institutions, there's no way Saverin would've been so successful so quickly:

Yet if you study the trajectory of Saverin’s life—the path that took him from being an immigrant kid to a Harvard student to an instant billionaire to the subject of an Oscar-winning motion picture—it emerges as a uniquely American story. At just about every step between his landing in Miami and his becoming a co-founder of Facebook, you find American institutions and inventions playing a significant part in his success.

As an immigrant myself, I’ve got no patience for the argument that he should keep all of it. Pretty much everything in my life that I enjoy wouldn’t have happened without my being in the United States. My education, my job, my wife and family, the fact that I’m not persecuted for my race or religion (I was born in South Africa), the fact that I can sometimes forget to lock my doors at night and not end up killed by marauding bands—I hate paying taxes as much as the next guy, but when I think about all the ways that the United States has been integral to everything in my life, taxes seem like a tiny price.

But of course paying paying "a lot" of taxes on billions of dollars is far worse than never having made the money in the first place, so.

Archie Bunker used to say about America "love it or lump it!"; today, he'd probably say "love it or take your huge lump of cash and get the hell outta here with it in case I wake up tomorrow as a genius billionaire and hafta pay more in taxes!"

On a side note, why the hell is Harvard getting almost $700M/year in federal grants when it's sitting on an endowment of over $3B and other colleges are going broke? Oh, yeah:

In America, we like front-runners. I believe it was Patrick Henry who said "Give me liberty or give me death, and my favorite golfer is Tiger Woods."