This is hilariously disingenuous. He's paying 15% on current value and renouncing his citizenship to avoid paying his taxes on its fair market value when the IPO hits.

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination against people making money, but you have an obligation to pay it forward to the society that enabled you to do it. Defending this sort of behavior smacks of the wealth-worshipper disease and there's not a lot worse than that.

In what way is he not paying back the society that enabled him? He's paying the designated rate, which will be hundreds of millions of dollars, on the present value of the what he's earned.

What would be satisfactory? That he paid based on the ipo price? What the stock is worth at the end of ipo day (likely inflated)? What it's worth a year from now? 5 years? 10 years? What would be fair?

What would at least be better would be to pay the designated rate when he sells, rather than paying the designated rate on a severely deflated valuation of the company, but only after being given the opportunity to sell his shares at a much higher price.

If I understand the situation correctly. He is basically going to be allowed to pay capital gains on $X after selling for something like $10X, making his rate more like 1.5%.

Why do you care? really?

Because taxing rich people at or below the rate of middle-class people is part of what allows wealth to become more and more concentrated as time goes by, which has bad consequences for the country in which I live.

Are you really that unaware of how taxes work? Have you never paid taxes before? He's not being taxed at a certain rate because he's rich. The taxes are for capital gains income. If you as a middle class person, or someone on welfare had 100k shares of FB stock, they'd be taxed at the same 15% as if a billionaire had them. If a billionaire went out and earned their income with a job paid at $10m cash a year... then guess what? They're going to pay the same 35-38% rate on that income that you would pay. Its not about the wealth, its about how its made. If you really are concerned about wealth, try to figure out how the system works first before criminalizing those who have

I'm fully aware of how this stuff works. The fact of the matter is that wealthy people are likely to obtain the vast majority of their income from capital gains, and middle class people are likely to obtain the vast majority of their income from labor. Thus, by taxing capital gains less, you wind up taxing the rich less. No, it's not written into law that way, but that's how it works out.

If you want to continue the discussion, do you think you could try to do without the personal attacks? They're very irritating and completely uncalled for here.

A rate is not the same thing as a value. 15% of $1B is a hell of a lot more than 15% of $50K.