And this right here is why we flag political stories off the front page. For those of you looking for the comment flag button, click the timestamp on the comment.
It's not just that political stories generate horrid comments like this. All stories do that. It's that political stories generate entire threads based on horrid comments. The stage is set for nastiness, and people act accordingly. More often than not, at peak nastiness, the people yelling at each other mostly agree with each other!
The wealth tax in Switzerland is quite low, the fact that capital gains are not taxed more than makes up for the wealth tax. Swiss passports are far more valuable than US passports, I'd be afraid to travel in much of the world on a US passport. Depending on income sources, renouncing US citizenship might be a good deal as the US feels it should tax citizens regardless of where they are earning their income in the world.
In order to keep things on topic I'll ignore most of what you wrote and just talk about purchasing housing here. My wife and I just bought an apartment in Zürich and found it very different than the u.s. One must put down a minimum of 20% always, but we ended up having to put down 30% because the bank calculates your payments on a much higher interest rate than reality as well as higher maintenance fees than reality. We also had to have life insurance.
The news article and my comments are about purchasing housing.
And we have permanent residence and are able to use our pensions but chose not to, other than pillar 3 which one does to get a tax advantage. Most people only use pillar 3 since the bank discourages using pillar 2. (basically, you funnel money through pillar 3 to the bank and get the tax break)
Saving taxes in Switzerland doesn't help us much though since we have to pay the difference to the u.s.
I think you may want to take a deep breath and go outside for awhile.
