People write to me saying what new problems the state will cause them if they cancel their permanent residence in the EU.
I explain that the question should be asked in reverse - what new problems will the state cause them if they keep their permanent residence. For then they will remain much more vulnerable to potential attacks by the state, as they will continue to be on the database of health and social security payers, the tax office and all sorts of registers that allow the state to contact them, harass them and fine them.
They will soon be forced to use the eID, the EU's centralised snooping service with all sensitive data, which will gradually apply to all EU residents (legislation has already been passed).
And you really don't want any of this.
If only you value your own privacy (and are even more aware of how easy it is to hack state databases), then you should be doing everything you can to completely minimize your personal footprint in a state that is collapsing into digital dystopia and fiscal fascism.
You should expect that giving up your permanent residency will become increasingly difficult - the US or Germany has already introduced an "exit tax" and requires you to pay a percentage of your German company's assets as a ransom. This trend is sure to continue.
The EU is about to introduce global tax fascism- explicitly making it impossible or penalising rich people who choose to leave tax hell for a lower tax country (see point 3 below).
I think that, just as it is essential to save in Bitcoin in the current hard inflationary times, it is essential to abolish EU permanent residency as soon as possible, because then it will only get more complicated. Especially if the EU assesses you as a rich person and starts hunting you down.
The EU Tax Observatory has published the research report "Global Tax Evasion 2024".
The report: https://t.co/QkrD1vaOL5
It is specified that the study is not limited to the concept of tax evasion in the narrow sense of fraud: some of the practices considered are clearly illegal, for example, failure to report income earned in offshore bank accounts. Others fall in the gray area between tax avoidance and evasion - for example, transferring profits to shell companies with no economic presence. Others are clearly legal, such as moving to another jurisdiction to benefit from special tax regimes designed to attract wealthy individuals. But all of these allow the economic actors who have benefited most from globalization to lower tax rates to even lower levels, reducing government revenues and increasing inequality. As the report argues, "at stake in all cases is the social sustainability of globalization and modern tax systems."
The report makes six recommendations to address tax evasion:
1. Reform the international minimum corporate tax treaty by introducing a 25% rate and eliminate loopholes in it that promote tax competition
2. Introduce a new global minimum tax for billionaires worldwide equal to 2% of their wealth
3. Introduce mechanisms to tax rich people who have lived in a country for a long time and decide to move to a low-tax country
4. Take unilateral measures to recover a portion of the tax deficit of multinational companies and billionaires if global agreements on these issues fail
5. Move to create a global asset registry to better combat tax evasion
6. Strengthen enforcement of economic presence rules and anti-avoidance rules
Solopreneurship 101:
Comparing yourself to others is the easiest way to get distracted.
You can only control how successful you are, not how successful someone else is.
Be the best version of yourself, not a better version of someone else.
@ericyakes Is there a nice reference for ”Each stakeholder group has certain forms of power and lacks other forms (paper beats rock but loses to scissors)”