this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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neoliberals advocate for open borders only for capital. Capitalism itself would collapse overnight if there was free movement of labour
Just not true
Schengen zone, and to a lesser extent USA, show that capitalism can continue to function with a free movement of labor within relatively large and varied economic zones. This would continue to be the case worldwide, I believe. There remains significant barriers to movement even without borders: time, money, separation from family and cultural support systems, and more. There are people in the US and EU who want to "escape" their current state/country due to local laws but cannot do so despite it being perfectly legal to do so.
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You do an FEIE deduction on your 1040. If you're earning less than $120,000 in a year and live more than 330 days outside of the US during a tax year, you thus don't need to pay a single dollar to the IRS.
(I agree it's messed up that US citizens have to file taxes, but you don't need to resign your citizenship to avoid paying US taxes - as long as you're a bona fide resident of a foreign country and earn less than $120k.)
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You're earning significantly over $120k/year? Then you file a form 1116 to have a credit against foreign-paid taxes. And even then, whatever income was left over after deductions doesn't put you automatically in the highest tax classes.
Where are you living where you're earning so much? I know many US expats, basically no one is earning that much, much less native-born citizens. It's the US that usually pays much more for engineering, not as much in RoW.
Is your cost of living so high that you're unable to save any of your super high income? You don't necessarily need to "extract wealth from other people".
It sucks to need to file taxes to a regime you're not residing in, but you surely understand the purpose of it? Don't you think it's probably a good thing that billionaires can't just make big profits in the US and pretend they're living in Malta?
Sorry, but as someone who has helped several high-earning expats with their US taxes, it really seems like you're either setting hinders for yourself (intentionality or otherwise), or doing some creative writing.
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Good, and you understand how the level calculations work, right? If you earn $121k, you're only going to calculate taxes for $1k of income for example.
It sucks to pay even a cent to the US, but probably still cheaper and less risk compared to giving up citizenship -- especially if you have family there that'd you'd like to be able to visit in the future.
That makes it a bit more complicated, but if you're abroad over 330 days, you'd fill form 673 to prevent withholding for example. Have you not retained an accountant to help guide you through this? Based on the information you've shared, it seems like you're paying a lot more into the system than you need to.
That sucks, but it's not responsive to my argument.
It is true. I'm talking about all borders mate.
Why is capitalism perfectly functional within regions of open borders but would not function within a larger region of open/no borders?
Do you have a response to the concept of practical borders applying whether or not there are legal borders?
Because Europe is externalizing the capitalist exploitation outside of Europe. We saw the instant upheavals that happened when they dared to take a small amount of refugees from the places they and their US allies have been destabilizing for decades. And that was with just a fraction of a fraction of the population movement that would happen from the exploited nations to the exploiting ones through open borders.
I think I get what you're saying wrt exploitation of the global south, but this is a very out of date view in my opinion.
The physical location of a person does not determine the value that can be exploited out of them by capital, it is why some leftists take an anti-immigration stance as it can drive down wages by increasing supply of labour domestically, which is proof enough that one can be exploited no matter where you are located.
In the neoliberal world the argument is then that with wages being driven down living should also get significantly cheaper as the cost of products comes down and companies lower prices to out-compete each other. Of course in reality due to concentration of power in so few hands companies often behave more like a cartel so it doesn't happen.
In theory with strong minimum wage laws exploitation should be much harder to achieve locally than via outsourcing (you can't run a sweatshop in the UK), but those minimums are often so out of touch with actual living expenses that a decrease in wages even far above the minimum is sorely felt on the middle income working class.
There's still some exploitation that can only be done with overseas labour, sure, but it's really less and less as globalization equalises the global labour market. Once scammers used to be far more common in poorer countries, now grifters are everywhere.
And I think when it comes to the EU and the refugee crisis, that isn't necessarily related to this, it just coincided that severe contradictions in neoliberal race to the bottom trickle down austerity economics coincided with an influx of immigration, and Europe was always quite racist tbh and especially islamophobic, so grifters seized on stoking the fears of cultural shifts and jobs being taken.
Of course capitalism is inherently unstable, and it naturally radicalizes those exploited by it. Which is why capital is unrestricted by borders and flees to other nations to exploit once the local market becomes too unruly and then requires state violence to keep the radicalism in check. This works much better when the exploiter and exploited are in different nations and a whole nation becomes effectively the bourgeoisie while another becomes the proletariat. All the people living in "bourgeoisie nation" then get pacified by the spoils of the prole nation, and the latter is suppressed militarily and kept out of sight and out of mind.
Remove the borders and the exploited in the poor nations will immediately immigrate and destroy the standards of living for the rich nations and therefore destroy the pacifier keeping their local labour in check.
There is no situation where completely opened borders for labour wouldn't collapse the system. It's why liberal nations become more xenophobic as time progresses regardless of how many noble ideas they are espousing. If it was in the benefit of capital to have no borders, they would have done it ages ago, but they perfectly well understand what would happen, which is why all the rich people naturally promote stronger borders for labour, not less.