And as they walk out the door, strip them of their American citizenship and bar them from entry into the US for the rest of their lives. If they try to sneak back in, lock them up in prison and throw away the key.
And almost all of them will still say, "Okey-dokey," and never try to reenter...and they'll still take their money with them. What then?
I note that your first reaction is to not examine the problem from a perspective of "Why do the richest people seek to leave this country and take their money with them?" Instead, it's "How can we punish those evil rich people for taking their tax payments with them?"
Are there any other rich people you'd like to keep out of this country?
Are you sure you're posting at the right website?
And as they walk out the door, strip them of their American citizenship and bar them from entry into the US for the rest of their lives. If they try to sneak back in, lock them up in prison and throw away the key.
You obviously didn't take the time to read the whole article. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, referred to in that article, already denies reentry to wealthy expatriates. Follow the link. It's there in black and white. Furthermore, as also pointed out in the above article, although most expats do not officially renounce their citizenship, they are implicitly accepting that they will never return to the US, when they leave without paying the exorbitant patriotism penalty, of an additional 10 years of US income tax. You fail to understand that it is this very attitude of people like you and our elected officials, that we should strip the wealthy of their assets and citizenship, when they leave, that is one of the primary motivations for this exodus.
It seems that you are under the mistaken impression that the US actually offers something that these people may want. They're rich. Whatever amenity their new country doesn't offer them for free, they will buy with the money that they save, by moving offshore. In some countries, minor electric power outages may occur from time to time, so the wealthy expats buy commercial UPS systems. In some countries, phone service is either unreliable or has a lot of noise on the line, so the wealthy expats have satellite phones. They don't think like you. It's not, "What will the government do for me?", but, "Will the government stay out of my way and let me run my business?"
In 1999, when I asked a retired marine officer acquaintance, who had fled the US in 1997, if he didn't want to go back, his response was, "Why would I want to go back to a country that treated my like the 'enemy', (his word) simply because I had the audacity to make a few million dollars after I retired from defending that very same county?" BTW, he is still proud of his Marine service. Regardless of how he is dressed, when you see him, your first thought will be, "Marine". His house is filled with Marine paraphernalia and photos. He told me that leaving the USA was the hardest thing that he ever did, but that legislators, determined to control his wealth, left him no choice. When I asked him about family back in the US, he told me that with just a tiny portion of the additional income that he has earned since moving offshore, he had already paid to fly both his brother's family and his sister's large family to each visit him at each of his two homes (in two countries). I saw him a couple of years later and he told me that he had absolutely no regrets.
History has proven that the more a government tightens its grip on wealth, the more wealth slips out of its control. If the kid with the football keeps getting beat up by his teammates, after every game, pretty soon, he will take his football and find a new team to play with.