|
Townhall
Finance
More
Americans Going Galt
Daniel J. Mitchell
Aug 12, 2013
President
Obama promised he would
unite the world…and he’s right.
Representatives
from dozens of
nations have bitterly complained about an awful piece of legislation,
called
the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), that was enacted back
in 2010.
They
despise this unjust law
because it extends the power of the IRS into the domestic affairs of
other
nations. That’s an understandable source of conflict, which should be
easy to
understand. Wouldn’t all of us get upset, after all, if the French
government
or Russian government wanted to impose their laws on things that take
place
within our borders?
But
it’s not just foreign
governments that are irked. The law is so bad that it is causing a big
uptick
in the number of Americans who are giving up their citizenship.
Here
are some details from a
Bloomberg report.
Americans
renouncing U.S.
citizenship surged sixfold in the second quarter from a year earlier…
Expatriates giving up their nationality at U.S. embassies climbed to
1,131 in
the three months through June from 189 in the year-earlier period,
according to
Federal Register figures published today. That brought the first-half
total to
1,810 compared with 235 for the whole of 2008. The U.S., the only
nation in the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes
citizens
wherever they reside.
I’m
glad that the article mentions
that American law is so out of whack with the rest of the world.
We
should be embarrassed that our
tax system – at least with regard to the treatment of citizens living
abroad
and the treatment of tax exiles – is worse than what they have in
nations such
as France.
And
while there was an increase in
the number of Americans going Galt after Obama took office, the recent
increase
seems to be the result of the FATCA legislation…
Read
the rest of the article at
Townhall Finance
|
