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from the breaking-up-is-hard-to-do dept.
The USA has been making life difficult for Americans residing abroad; FATCA causes plenty of problems; but so does citizenship-based taxation. The IRS and Treasury department have made the reporting and taxation more onerous, and stepped up their collection efforts.
The result should be a surprise to no one: more and more Americans are handing in their US citizenship. Total numbers are unavailable (the lists published by the government include only a portion of the total), but undisputed is the fact that the numbers are increasing rapidly.
Having lots of citizens want to leave is...embarrassing. One solution could be to review the policies leading to people to hand in their citizenship. Another would be to make the fee unaffordable, especially for people living on second- or third-world incomes. It's obvious, of course, which route the USA has chosen: It now costs $2350 to hand in your US passport; more than 20 times the international average.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday December 03 2014, @01:36PM
I heavily dispute it unless you can prove otherwise.
In the past if you wanted/needed to renounce it was a same day operation, more or less. Now the demand is so high that some consulates in Canada are booked for many months into the future. Go ahead, call the Toronto consulate and try to schedule a renunciation...
You can also look at a .gov provided graph of the fake data and see its going up pretty fast.
If you're a Canadian "for real" and an accidental American then you pretty much can't visit the USA anymore unless you file back taxes and massive punishment payments, and then spend a lot of time and money renouncing. Getting all freaked out about thousands of dollars is not a big deal, considering the IRS probably wants $500K or more for the income you earned as a lifelong Canadian citizen working in Canada, and you're going to have to take time off work and travel to Toronto, etc.
Its a really huge problem... go talk to some Canadians. Your crime is having a dad originally from Oregon, and next thing you know you're arrested when you visit the USA on vacation. Or your bank closes your account because you're a money laundering terrorist. "everyone has heard a story".
You probably won't be extradited, but you'll never be able to visit the USA (legally) unless you pay up.
The primary real world effect is if you're a retired Canadian old dude with a USA parent, you can go on vacation, as the foreigner you are, to the USA for the first time in your life, if you pay $50K, or you can say F the USA and go on vacation in .mx or ireland or whatever. Or just travel the USA illegally which has all kinds of interesting implications if you get caught.
(Score: 4, Funny) by zocalo on Wednesday December 03 2014, @01:45PM
It still can be, if you think outside the box. Book travel to some random ISIS occupied hell hole in Syria or Iraq and CC Senator Ted Cruz [time.com] your travel plans. Make your (soon to be ex-) government work for you, just for once!
There's a downside to everything though, right? :p
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday December 03 2014, @01:52PM
"everyone has heard a story"
Oh I forgot my favorite story, the spammers and scammers have caught on and I've heard plenty of stories from Canadians about getting email and postal spam from "the IRS" requesting $500 fees and stuff because "everyone's heard about it". Often the spam claims the IRS accepts paypal or credit card payments, LOL.
(Score: 2, Informative) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday December 03 2014, @02:35PM
Often the spam claims the IRS accepts paypal or credit card payments, LOL.
In fact, the IRS does accept credit card payments [irs.gov].
I am a crackpot
(Score: 1) by Lunix Nutcase on Wednesday December 03 2014, @03:33PM
The IRS does accept credit card payments. Has so for years and years now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @04:43AM
"everyone has heard a story"
Oh I forgot my favorite story, the spammers and scammers have caught on and I've heard plenty of stories from Canadians about getting email and postal spam from "the IRS" requesting $500 fees and stuff because "everyone's heard about it". Often the spam claims the IRS accepts paypal or credit card payments, LOL.
Elle Oh fucking Elle.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Wednesday December 03 2014, @05:03PM
You write as if illegal entry into, and work/travel within the USA incurs any real risk of arrest or deportation these days.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Lunix Nutcase on Wednesday December 03 2014, @05:07PM
You seem to falsely imply it *ever* entailed much risk of arrest or importation. Illegals have been freely coming and going and working in the US with hardly any risk for decades and decades. You do realize that was part of the reason Reagan granted amnesty nearly 30 years ago, right?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 03 2014, @06:24PM
I somewhat recently visited Ontario to attend a Catholic wedding because the American arch-bishop wanted a bigger pay-off than the Canadian one. The Canadian hosts at the Bed-and-Breakfast where we stayed expressed a desire for Canada to join the United States. I said, no that's horrible, we Americans need a place to go when stuff gets too crazy here. But now I know that even that would be insufficient. Humans who desire freedom need a new place, be it Antarctica, or Mars. America tried to be the place where innovators could succeed, but in the end it turned into the worst guarantors of the status quo there could be.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Wednesday December 03 2014, @09:52PM
It's all relative. Compared to our right wing government Obama is pretty transparent and is more supportive of your rights then our government is of our rights.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 03 2014, @10:18PM
Humans who desire freedom need a new place, be it Antarctica, or Mars. America tried to be the place where innovators could succeed, but in the end it turned into the worst guarantors of the status quo there could be.
Well, how much do you value freedom? I notice on this discussion forum there is a lack of people advocating for the freedom of developing world labor to displace expensive developed world labor (eg, complaining about the "race to the bottom" of unskilled labor competition), the freedom of people not to pay via taxes for certain pipe dreams expressed here (eg, free education, various Big Science projects, social safety nets, Robin Hood schemes, etc), and scary people (illegal immigrants, terrorists, criminals, racists, Ukrainians, etc). If you want the freedom to change the world in ways you like say via innovation, you end up granting a similar private someone the means via those same channels to change the world in ways you don't like.
The reason I mention the above is that I see a lot of people complaining about declining freedom and stagnation in the developed world while simultaneously advocating policies that make that problem worse. A typical example is the pension. These have the dual role of creating yet another reason for the public to ignore the future while simultaneously created a pervasive and sometimes intrusive service that can be used by the holder (public or private) to further their own schemes or merely to just get rich and powerful. I consider such things fundamental to the modern "bread and circuses" (here, on the "bread" side) that are used to keep a large portion of humanity controlled.
Consider this. In the US, there has long been greedy and unprincipled people. What's any different today that wasn't true with the monopoly trusts a century ago or the slave traders two centuries years ago? The answer is that via government they have access to far more wealth and power than they did in those olden days. For example, the federal government of 1914 had just started to abandon the long trend of consuming roughly 2-4% of the US's contemporary GDP (in the build up to the First World War). States have experienced similar increases in spending. Now, the federal government has over 20% spending relative to current GDP (including Social Security) with states spending similar levels. There's far more to fight over and exploit now than there was.
Regulation has similarly jumped [mercatus.org] with modern regulation (measured by the crude metric of pages of the official federal publication, "Code of Federal Regulations") having gone up by almost 150% between 1975 and 2012 (there are similar trends [ipa.org.au] in Australia). I wouldn't be surprised to read of profitable automated data mining of developed world regulatory/legal systems for novel tax loopholes, subsidies, and other profitable schemes in the coming decades.
I think a principle component of modern stagnation is the desire for security. The citizen wants protection from risks and scary people; businesses want a predictable, uncompetitive market for their products; and everyone wants a bailout when things don't go well. Freedom gets consistently compromised by implementation of all these desires especially when the system is gamed.
(Score: 2) by emg on Thursday December 04 2014, @02:31AM
Moving to Mars won't stop the IRS chasing you...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by brocksampson on Thursday December 04 2014, @05:35AM
If you're a Canadian "for real" and an accidental American then you pretty much can't visit the USA anymore unless you file back taxes and massive punishment payments, and then spend a lot of time and money renouncing. Getting all freaked out about thousands of dollars is not a big deal, considering the IRS probably wants $500K or more for the income you earned as a lifelong Canadian citizen working in Canada, and you're going to have to take time off work and travel to Toronto, etc.
When US citizens living abroad move back to the US they have a five-year grace period during which they can settle their back taxes without penalties. This process is triggered when you change your residence. How then is it possible that Canadians who have never resided in the US are slapped with a tax bill the moment they cross the US border? I think this is a case of a friend told a friend told a friend because unless you actually try to move to the US on your American passport the IRS isn't even informed of your presence in the country. (You do, however, have to settle your taxes when you renounce your citizenship.)