US-EU transplant here. No, the United States does not have anything even vaguely similar like this. Seriously putting forward the idea of an exit tax on anyone who owns more than 1% of any LLC worldwide would in all likelihood be deeply politically unpopular. It goes against the very name and spirit of a limited liability company, for one. For two (real ballpark number here) about 1 in 10 Americans would actively be subject to a German style exit tax like this, concentrated among working adults.

You're probably instead thinking of income tax, which the US does levy worldwide contrary to virtually every other nation on Earth and is, I can tell you from personal experience, not fun. There is a a much narrower exit tax for US citizens who wish to actually give up their citizenship outright (not just move out) but that generally only comes into play for anyone with $2 million or more in net worth, and exists probably to discourage tax evasion, to my understanding. There is truly nothing remotely like the "you have to pay us if you own 1% of any LLC anywhere and move out" approach Germany has.

> There is truly nothing remotely like the "you have to pay us if you own 1% of any LLC anywhere and move out" approach Germany has.

To be clear, this is if you move _your company_ out of Germany (which I don't think the article makes very clear). In those terms it seems to make a little more sense. As outlined in this comment.[0]

The double income taxation of their expats that America, Eritrea, and Myanmar do is a bit different, but I think they have double taxation agreements with most countries. So in actuality most Americans don't have to fully pay the double tax (depending on where they live, and how much they earn) though they still have to file and everything.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44834878

> For two (real ballpark number here) about 1 in 10 Americans would actively be subject to a German style exit tax like this, concentrated among working adults.

I'm sure that a sizeable percentage of Americans own a significant amount of shares via 401k or whatever, but it feels surprising if 1 in 10 own more than 1% of a company, because all of those people holding shares as investments will be buying shares in companies with thousands or millions of other investors.

But maybe it's true - I just googled about the US has 340m people and 32.5m companies - so the majority of them must be small (population/number of companies). And while a lot of companies will be owned by the same people or just administrative divisions of a group of companies, most companies have multiple directors so maybe on average it does balance out to 1 in 10 owning a decent chunk of a company. It just feels like a surprising fact.

This site [1] has some interesting stats on size of businesses, although it's interesting that in 2019 these figures say there were less than 8m businesses, which disagrees with what google told me. Also says over half of US companies have 0-4 employees.

[1] https://paradoxesinc.com/resources/us-business-patterns/

> You're probably instead thinking of income tax, which the US does levy worldwide contrary to virtually every other nation on Earth and is, I can tell you from personal experience, not fun.

That's certainly what I was thinking of, given I have a few US friends here in the UK. Isn't the way to stop that to simply give up dual citizenship?

State of California has exit tax.

Exit tax applies to some Green Card holders too.