given the direction things are going, it may just be better to cut and run.
Exactly my attitude when we did just that.
I had originally planned to work until no longer physically able (I was self-employed), but after the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act and the rush to war in 2002-03 in which dissenters were depicted by Bush and his supporters as traitors, cowards, parasites, appeasers, America haters, terrorist sympathizers - everything but fellow American - we could see the writing on the wall and, as you know, chose to retire ASAP and emigrate.
It was an excellent choice for us, and we have never regretted it or looked back (I haven't been in the States since 2011 and expect that I will never return). We found a better life in Mexico - happier people, a better culture, excellent climate in the mountains, and lower prices. America really had little to offer us then, and less now. It's worse now than then, and promises to get worse yet as the Kennedy announcement suggests.
Incidentally, we're weeks away from acquiring citizenship in our new home. We just had our Interpol criminal background checks yesterday to confirm that we are not in any legal difficulty anywhere in the world. We had to fly to the country's capital, and ran into some Canadian friends that are neighbors at our airline terminal traveling to Vancouver. We asked them why they were flying South from Guadalajara, a major city, to Mexico City, in order to fly north, and they told us that it was to avoid having to land in America. There are direct flights from Mexico City to Vancouver, but none from Guadalajara that didn't connect in Houston, Dallas, or whatever. They simply refuse to deal with TSA.
