Quote from Brendan R:
moving countries is a difficult one. It depends what stage you are in your life. If you have a family, you want to go somewhere with low criminality, drug addiction,vice... and good education.
If you don't have a family, a bit vice may not harm.
How course the family reduces your universe of possibles to a few selected places.
Also you need to take into account being far from your elders and friends.
Then, it also depends on your income generation. Are you retired, do you trade for a living,...
All these constraints can dramatically reduce the number of places you can choose from.
What you will not find is a place that is cheap, fun, safe, with good weather and with low taxes.
If I didn't have a family, I would jumping from place to place.
The winter in Asia, the summer in Europe, spending less than 180 days in any country (or less depending on taxation rules) with a permanent residency in a place that doesn't tax offshore revenues, like HK.
With a family, you cannot move around because of school so you need a place that does not tax offshore revenues. There are a few but they may not meet the other criterias you're looking for.
That's the hard part, thinking about it like a single person it gets pretty easy to live somewhere else, the main thing is if the chicks dig Americans there. But with a family and kids, wow the choices narrow to pretty much nothing.
When you really sit and think about it we have only three choices - either fix the broken system here (a virtual impossibility), start our own country on an island somewhere (kind of a lonely prospect), or keep writing the fat checks to the government that they can hand out as they please and just sit here hating taxes and bitching about how wasteful government is knowing I am powerless to change it and just have to suck it up and deal with it - which is where I find myself.
I agree that we all need to pay some taxes, I like schools and paved roads and such, but when they say 50% of Americans don't pay taxes and the top 3% pay 33% of the taxes, something is wrong. Especially when you find yourself as one of the 3%. I guess the one thing we do have inside the US is the abiliy to at least jump easily to a different state where we can save a bit of money, I do believe that NY is shooting itself in the foot and will lose a lot of revenue in the end trying to tax the wealthy that will just move to FL or elsewhere.
The ones that try to follow me to the ends of the earth involve restraining orders and such.