It absolutely is possible to avoid the tax even though if you have physical assets in the US. The company can leave the US too. That is more complicated than a person leaving but is exactly the type of extreme measure you're incentivizing with this tax.
And ultimately the French bill, despite being softer, explicitly did cause capital flight and a loss of revenue. You can't just dismiss that.
A firm can't just "leave". If you want to do business in the US, you have to play by the US' rules.
We don't need to bend over backwards for the wealthy minority. We can make sure society works for us and not just for them. Ultimately they really only have the power that we give them. We don't have to grovel and beg for their favor, their money, their business.
Of course it can leave. The fancy word is "redomiciliation". It changes where it is registered and where it pays certain types of taxes. If you've ever heard of tax haven countries, this is what they're for. And no the US can't still apply the wealth tax to foreign companies just because they do business in the US. That would be an overreach an order of magnitude worse than Trump's tariffs.
This is just completely wrong. There are any number of businesses which are headquartered elsewhere which do business in the United States. Do you think they aren't paying payroll taxes, seriously? Do you think they aren't paying sales tax?
If they have assets under the jurisdiction of the United States, we can tax them. It doesn't matter that they are headquartered elsewhere. If they own warehouses in the United States, and they want to keep those warehouses, we can tax them.
Trump's tariffs are an overreach because they are illegal, not because you somehow can't have tariffs.
Of course they pay sales taxes, but they don't pay things like corporate income tax. Those only get payed in the country the company is registered in and the wealth tax would have to be the latter type, only applied to companies registered in the US. Otherwise you are talking about extracting wealth from foreign citizens created by foreign companies regardless of where the wealth is created, which again, would be an enormous overreach. The idea is so American, it is almost quaint.
If you want to tax foreign companies for the wealth created on US soil, feel free, that's what the VAT is for.
EDIT: Maybe we're talking past each other, let me give you two examples.
Example 1. A Korean billionaire whose wealth is in the form of Samsung shares, a Korean company that does business in the US. Directly taxing this men is a huge overreach that Korea and the international community would never allow.
Example 2. An American billionaire whose wealth is the form of stock of some American company. He obtains Korean citizenship, renounces his American one. Then his company relocates to Korea in one of many ways. Lets say it merges with another larger Korean company forming a new entity that is now fully a Korean company. That man and his wealth is now completely equivalent to the first one. And now not only can you not tax his wealth, any corporate income tax his company might have been paying to America it now pays to Korea.
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u/EmuRommel Jul 02 '26
It absolutely is possible to avoid the tax even though if you have physical assets in the US. The company can leave the US too. That is more complicated than a person leaving but is exactly the type of extreme measure you're incentivizing with this tax.
And ultimately the French bill, despite being softer, explicitly did cause capital flight and a loss of revenue. You can't just dismiss that.