Kim Priestap

Facebook Co-Founder renounces US citizenship just prior to IPO

By doing so, Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co-founder of Facebook Inc. (FB) will reduce his tax bill on Facebook’s IPO which is valued at $96 billion. More from Bloomberg:

Facebook plans to raise as much as $11.8 billion through the IPO, the biggest in history for an Internet company. Saverin’s stake is about 4 percent, according to the website Who Owns Facebook. At the high end of the IPO valuation, that would be worth about $3.84 billion. His holdings aren’t listed in Facebook’s regulatory filings.

Saverin, 30, joins a growing number of people giving up U.S. citizenship, a move that can trim their tax liabilities in that country. The Brazilian-born resident of Singapore is one of several people who helped Mark Zuckerberg start Facebook in a Harvard University dorm and stand to reap billions of dollars after the world’s largest social network holds its IPO.

Eduardo recently found it more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time,” said Tom Goodman, a spokesman for Saverin, in an e-mailed statement.

Saverin’s name is on a list of people who chose to renounce citizenship as of April 30, published by the Internal Revenue Service. Saverin renounced his U.S. citizenship “around September” of last year, according to his spokesman.

Singapore doesn’t have a capital gains tax. It does tax income earned in that nation, as well as “certain foreign- sourced income,” according to a government website on tax policies there.

Hey, if you want the movers and shakers and the job creators to live in and pay taxes in America, then our leaders have to make it an attractive proposition. Right now, it isn’t and I can’t blame men and women like Severin from making the jump. 

Steyn: Brokest Nation In History Fusses Instead About Sex

Mark Steyn once again writes brilliantly and honestly about the direction our nation’s leaders are taking us. His article at Investor’s Business Daily is a must read. Here’s a portion:

Have you seen the official White House version of what the New York Times headline writers call “A Responsible Budget”?  My favorite bit is Chart 5-1 on Page 58 of their 500-page appendix on “Analytical Perspectives.” This is entitled “Publicly Held Debt Under 2013 Budget Policy Projections.”

As shown above, it’s a straight line going straight up before disappearing off the top right-hand corner of the graph in the year 2084 and continuing northeast straight through your eye socket, out the back of your skull and zooming up to rendezvous with Newt’s space colony on the moon circa 2100.

Just to emphasize, this isn’t the doom-laden dystopian fancy of a right-wing apocalyptic loon like me; it’s the official Oval Office version of where America’s headed.

In the New York Times-approved “responsible budget” there is no attempt even to pretend to bend the debt curve into something approaching re-entry with reality.

As for us doom-mongers, at the House Budget Committee last Thursday, Chairman Paul Ryan produced another chart, this time from the Congressional Budget Office, with an even steeper straight line showing debt rising to 900% of GDP and rocketing off the graph circa 2075.

America’s Treasury Secretary, Timmy Geithner the TurboTax Kid, thought the chart would have been even more hilarious if they’d run the numbers into the next millennium: ”You could have taken it out to 3,000 or to 4,000” he chortled, to supportive titters from his aides.

Has total societal collapse ever been such a nonstop laugh riot?

“Yeah, right.” replied Ryan. “We cut it off at the end of the century because the economy, according to the CBO, shuts down in 2027 on this path.”

The U.S. economy shuts down in 2027? Had you heard about that? It’s like the ultimate President’s Day Sale: Everything must go — literally!

Read all of it.