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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: 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.