*checks watch*

Oh, sorry. Just waiting for you to realize that this is what happens in EVERY skilled field. Like why immigrants dominate your skilled professions and academics even though the best universities in the whole world live there.

America is a poorly optimized society. We spend way too much for healthcare, subsidize unhealthy foods, live in suburbs, pay way too much for **** education, and can't build affordable housing. It only makes sense we pick ****ty ball players too.

Jon`C: If that's what you believe (and I have no reason to disagree, it sounds like it's probably right), is there *anything* that the United States is genuinely competitive in that doesn't rest on having a monopoly on existing talent / IP?

Oh okay I'll get right on that, I think I can skip the power bill this month.

Like economists and academics are sounding red alert because skilled immigrants and students are starting to look elsewhere because they, you know, don't want to get stuck with a lease in Nazi America. That's a big ****ing problem for the United States because Jenny from Tennessee was too busy working full time at the local diner to take care of her fibromyalgic parents instead of going to MIT and probably isn't any time soon gonna help fill out the ranks of one of the 100 high tech companies that make the United States economically significant.

The United States' sole absolute advantage is its ability to attract and retain high skill immigrants.

I will say, it's a trope but many white Americans I know really are lazy as **** and rather entitled. It was in me, too, before I became homeless and decided to fight the world. My life still has been orders of magnitude less severe than immigrants, but I have a bit of understanding why they work so hard.

This isn't a ****ing fantasy roleplaying game where the American race has +1 dex and gets an extra martial weapons feat at level 2 guys. That's not how trade works. It's insanely uncommon for any country to have an absolute advantage in any area. You pick up comparative advantages in tiny bits and pieces here and there, like it's ever so slightly cheaper to make steel in Ohio because there's a lot of metallurgical coal there, so steel gets made in Ohio and then the West Virginians don't make steel, they make... um... moonshine, or whatever, instead.

So no, Americans aren't "better at" engineering, or programming, or math, or whatever else. Please disabuse yourself of this notion. If a US firm is out-competing foreign firms on their own merits, i.e. not anticompetitive abusive monopolist Boeing, it predominantly means foreign firms don't consider it a market worth pursuing.

The sole exception is the United States, because up until recently they did have an absolute advantage in attracting and retaining foreign immigrants. That made recruiting the world's best and brightest professionals and domain experts comparatively much easier for US firms, so by extension, the US also picked up an absolute advantage in these areas. But that shouldn't be confused with Americans having an absolute advantage. There is a difference.

So, my understanding from a mentor who handles grad admissions is, they have much stricter requirements on who they let in from foreign countries than domestic ones. Part of that I guess is because places like China have inflated GRE scores because of high incidences of cheating there, but still, there's a degree of protectionism even in grad school.

Jon`C: I don't think I ever said we were inherently better at any of those things! I believe in another thread I expressed some romantic attachment to specific institutions and milestones in the history of technological innovation, but those things are more a part of history than economics.

At any rate this meshes with the idea that we are mostly coasting on self-perpetuating inertia in IP and talent, but that there is no specific cultural or institutional reason that we should be inherently competitive.

Nah dude we have a racial advantage, +3 to eating, -1 to movement for every level past 3, healing takes longer and costs double gold.

But yeah, I'm not sure if you were referring to what I was saying, Chinese immigrants routinely crush the domestic talent in math. I mean, that's not exactly a fair description, because there are plenty of thoroughly talented Americans. But yeah, there are loads of very good immigrants in math, so, in my personal experience that seems dead accurate.

You asked in what areas the US is more competitive, and I wanted to make my answer as clear as possible because even asking that question is assuming a lot about trade and economic advantages that is almost never true. The US has one absolute advantage, which it has historically and currently uses to great effect. When that advantage is gone, the US will not be more competitive at anything. That doesn't mean the US won't specialize at least a little, because international trade almost guarantees it, but it won't ever again enjoy the kind of privileged position to which it has become accustomed.

This is all a roundabout way of saying: Who the **** is going to buy steel from the US when they can buy it from China?

Forgive me if I'm being a little dense here, but I am actually struggling to see what this has to do with what I wrote. I'm sure it's probably my fault.

I think I understand what you are getting at now. I probably should have avoided the term 'competitive', in part because I know jack all about economics, but mostly just because I thought your response to my soccer post had less to do with economic principles in general, and more to do with the kind of thing that Reid was alluding to when he said that we (the US, specifically) don't organize our society efficiently. I.e., if we are so bad at finding good soccer players just because they are poor, are we also bad at utilizing the best companies / inventors / etc.? Or are we coasting on existing clusters of IP / talent which paper over the inefficiencies? But I suspect I misread your post a bit.

You retold the plight of professional soccer players in the United States - specifically, that very talented lower income soccer players never have the opportunity to be discovered, because they can't afford to play or other obligations get in the way, and because they can't afford to go to college which is where recruitment happens.

I am saying this extends beyond professional sports, e.g. very talented math students in high school also never have the opportunity to be discovered, because they can't afford tutoring or advanced classes, don't have the time for a math team if their high school even have one, can't afford to go to college, or if they can, it's probably a community college or state teaching college instead of the kind of research university that might get them inducted into academia. That means the United States is gonna have an abnormally large amount of wasted domestic talent, and a lot of high skill professional jobs that it can't fill from a domestic hiring pipeline.

Thus, why skilled immigrants turning up their noses at the US is a red alert situation, instead of a mild inconvenience for certain US employers.

Ah, okay. So I did understand what you were saying. And you are saying that this is a very serious problem, and not at all something that a modern, developed country should ideally have to accept. There's something inherently inefficient about the way we have set things up here.

It's a big problem for the US because of the extreme concentration of high tech firms, their extreme importance to the US economy, and, as mentioned, the fact that you're basically sloughing the bottom half of your population into a pit of misery. Even if the US ditched their anti-intellectual culture, built generous social safety nets and offered free college educations to all comers, made a real effort at helping every citizen achieve their potential, you, statistically speaking, literally can't breed enough top technical talent to feed the beast. The US needs skilled immigration much more than any other country does.

This is a US specific problem. Other countries have the opposite problem, where we have a hard time establishing high tech firms because all of the top talent traditionally goes to the US.

Maybe I should shut my trap before more Americans realize how badly they're screwing themselves up.

Ah, that makes even more sense. So the extreme concentration of high tech implies that the highly skilled pipeline of immigrants is essential, something we couldn't produce domestically if we wanted to. I can see why the alarm bells would be sounding, and perhaps then we might say that this could be the most damaging effect of the Trump presidency of all.

Too late, you already did such a good job explaining it that this dumb American now understands quite clearly.

Darn.

I won't be an American for long if I ever get married.

Because I sure as hell aren't going to volunteer to become a surf to a corporation just to stop my children from dying of tuberculosis.

OTOH as far as the IRS is concerned, I'm an American for life.

You wouldn't be a serf. Serfs get to keep their surplus, employees don't. Being a corporate employee is much worse than being a serf.

This isn't true. You can renounce your American citizenship and pay your expatriation tax, and then you will no longer be considered a US tax resident. If the United States government believes you renounced your citizenship for purposes of tax avoidance you may be banned from re-entering the United States. This is currently law, although the Supreme Court ruled it unenforceable because the law does not empower the DHS to determine whether you intended to avoid tax. Really it's just an act of congress away, though.

IIRC, that expatriation tax makes it a net loss financially, especially if I am in a country which alraleady has a tax agreement with the U.S. to avoid double taxation.

In addition (and I could be wrong about this), renouncing citizenship has some serious downsides when it comes to travel (edit: which you alluded to).

I'm curious now: when companies like Intel set up shop in talent-rich places like Israel in addition to the United States, is this solely the result of being unable to get enough work visas for to man their domestic counterparts?

It isn't that bad. The expatriation tax only applies if you make more than $160k a year, have a net worth over $2 million, or have been out of compliance within the previous 5 years. If the tax does apply to you, the IRS uses what they call a mark-to-market regime (usually called a deemed disposition in other countries). What this means is that you report capital gains and/or losses as if you had sold all of your possessions, including real estate and stock, on the date that you renounced your citizenship. It's mostly painful for people who have a large but highly illiquid net worth, like the owners of small businesses, or homeowners during a property bubble. For those people, it may be difficult to pay the tax without selling your business or home, but this is a rare situation.

I'm not sure I understand this. I am not an accountant, but income reported for a deemed disposition is not actual income, and my understanding is that it usually should not be reported to your new tax residence. Even if you did need to report it, having no tax treaty with the US would not void your legal requirement to report that income, it would only affect your ability to claim a foreign tax deduction on the expatriation tax itself. Having a tax treaty would be pretty unequivocally a good thing in this situation, not a bad thing.

You cannot renounce your US citizenship unless you are a citizen of another country first. The US will not allow you to become a stateless person no matter how much you might want to be one. Once you have renounced your citizenship, the main downside is that you will no longer have a US passport, and will be treated as a foreign national when entering the US.

not everybody wants to live in the US bro.

Okay, I admit that was a dumb thing for me to say. At any rate, Intel is a multinational corporation as much as it is an American corporation, with markets all over the place, so why not.

No, it's an American corporation.

Intel was founded in the US, it's traded on NASDAQ in New York, the executives and managers all live and work in Santa Clara, it is culturally American, it is iconically American. They consider themselves an American company and their non-American presence as second-tier branch plants, because that's how American companies act. When Intel does business in other countries they are representing America as an American corporation, and when they do bad things in other countries it is Americans doing bad things.

There is no such thing as a multi-national corporation.

Doesn't apply to me.




I wasn't clear here. The tax treaty is a reason not to renounce citizenship, because it presumably makes me (effectively) a tax resident of the other country alone, effectively sparing me from the long reach of the IRS.



I gotta admit, this would be kind of unattractive so long as I still have family here, and, well, so long as the big tech firms make it difficult to pay foreign workers.

NOPE.

US citizens are taxed on their world income regardless of their tax residency status. You must file Forms 1040 and 114 every year, reporting all of your foreign income and foreign financial accounts. You may take a foreign tax deduction to reduce the amount of US taxes you owe.

That is the least of your problems, though. Because the US government is awful, they will demand your foreign financial institution (ref: Form 114) file certain forms and provide information about you to the State Department. These demands/obligations are onerous enough that many foreign banks will not do business with a US citizen regardless of their tax residence or other citizenship.

I mean, when I said this ^ don't feel bad about not knowing, because that is exactly the way it works for pretty much every country on earth. The US is the only country I know of that taxes the world income of their citizens even when they are functionally expatriated.

Honestly though, as far as tax authorities go, the IRS really isn't that bad to deal with. It's not their fault the US has moon man taxes. Your forms are really clean and easy to fill out, the tax code is all laid out for you, and it's easy to find out where you stand with them. They do some strange stuff, like they don't mail you a statement of account after they process your return, only when they have identified a problem. They're also critically understaffed. But other than that, Americans have the tax thing pretty easy.

The CRA, on the other hand... sigh.

Actually, the IRS saved me some money by notifying me that I made a mistake in my taxes.

What depresses me is that there was a bill to have the IRS complete your taxes for you, which they presumably do anyway when they check your work, but IIRC Grover Norquist and his lunatic fringe "starve the beast" think tank, Americans for Tax Reform, successfully lobbyied against it, stating that it might tragically lead to more government revenue if people became lazy and didn't catch mistakes made by the IRS in which they overpayed.

The sad thing is, the IRS already completes your taxes for you. They know exactly what you owe them. They just aren't allowed to tell you until you make a mistake first.

So.. time to dump Bitcoin?

So Rex Tillerson, man at the helm of Exxon during anti-union efforts allegedly formed a suicide pact with Mattis and Mnuchin, so that all three will leave if Trump pushes one out. Could explain why Trump didn't fire Tillerson. Also ironic that, first thing a person like him does when placed under a ****ty boss (like many Americans) is to form coalitions with other employees. Hmm...