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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: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Wednesday December 03 2014, @05:05PM
For example: If the USA charged $991, and 9 other countries charged $1 for renunciation, then the "average" would be 1000/10 = $100. So the US would only be 10 times the average. However, it's clear that the US is 110 times more expensive than they ought to be. A geometric mean of the non-zero data would be $2, giving a ratio of 445x, which seems to represent more closely how most people would view the disparity.
In the real world case, in the top table only, the arithmetic mean is given as $197. Treating the $0 as $1, the geometric mean is only $57. Across both tables, the geometric mean falls to $43.
Arithmetic means almost never give you a meaningful answer when there are highly-skewed distributions. Geometric often does, but some might say that chosing that was just as arbitrary as chosing the arithmetic mean. Fortunately, there's a way out - the most average of all averages is actually the median - its pretty-much immune from skewing by one rogue datum. The median across both tables appears to be $47.
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