"Taxing you no matter where you breathe on this Earth is wanton American exceptionalism. What other nations don't dare do to their citizens, the U.S. Government doesn't think twice about.""The US, like only two other countries in the world (The Philippines and Eritrea), insists on taxing its citizens abroad. And if you try to renounce (say, because you don't want to pay taxes on lands you have in France that you would like to pass along to your French children), they will treat you like a tax dodger, with sanctions including blacklisting you in the Federal Registry, denying you reentry into the US indefinitely, and taxing your projected US earnings for the next ten years after renouncing."
Electing to leave: A reader's guide to expatriating on November 3
http://harpers.org/archive/2004/10/0080240The most serious barrier to renouncing your citizenship is that the State Department, which oversees expatriation, is reluctant to allow citizens to go “stateless.” Before allowing expatriation, the department will want you to have obtained citizenship or legal asylum in another country—usually a complicated and expensive process, if it can be done at all. Would-be renunciants must also prove that they do not intend to live in the United States afterward. Furthermore, you cannot renounce inside U.S. borders; the declaration must be made at a consul's office abroad.
Those who imagine that exile will be easily won would do well to consider the travails of Kenneth Nichols O'Keefe. An ex-Marine who was discharged, according to his website, under “other than honorable conditions,” O'Keefe has tried officially to renounce his citizenship twice without success, first in Vancouver and then in the Netherlands. His initial bid was rejected after the State Department concluded that he would return to the United States—a credible inference, as O'Keefe in fact had returned immediately. After his second attempt, O'Keefe waited seven months with no response before he tried a more sensational approach. He went back to the consulate at The Hague, retrieved his passport, walked outside, and lit it on fire. Seventeen days later, he received a letter from the State Department informing him that he was still an American, because he had not obtained the right to reside elsewhere. He had succeeded only in breaking the law, since mutilating a passport is illegal. It says so right on the passport.
The right to expatriate is fundamental; the British subjects who claimed their freedom in North America in 1776 cited it as a law of nature in the Declaration of Independence. In today's America, though, expatriates are a lot less respectable than they were then. The gun law casts them onto a heap with the rest of America's least loved. And gun dealers are only some of the parties newly interested in keeping tabs on them. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service doesn't trust them; nor does the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Anyone else who might consider them suspicious, moreover, will have no problem finding out who they are: A list of their names has started showing up every quarter in the Federal Register.
It is printed thanks to Sam Gibbons: a Florida Democrat now retired from Congress. In 1995, he sponsored a bill to publicly identify Americans who commit what he called "the despicable act of renouncing their allegiance to the United States." Rep. Gibbons imagined that the list would include "a handful of the wealthiest of the wealthy" who give up their passports for one reason: to dodge taxes. So far, the lists have run not to handfuls but to hundreds of names - from Adankus and Ahn, through Kelly and Kikuchi, and all the way to Yoo and Zerafa. If billionaires lurk among them, they aren't famous billionaires. True, many might have stood to save on taxes. But for many more, a tax bill was far from the first thing on their minds; their motives for turning into un-Americans, if you listen to them, are as various as the roots their names recall.
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So why would I want to leave, you may ask? Why would I want to stop paying my taxes? Well it isn't because I am a rich man and trying to avoid taxes. It is because I no longer feel that the powers that be are upholding their end of the social contract. I have paid plenty of money in taxes only to watch it spent disproportianately on weapons of war and killing, lining the pockets of the already filthy rich and destroying the environment we live in for the expediency of pure corporate greed. Meanwhile, we continue to allow a sickening number of people to be homeless, jobless, toothless, armed and crazy. I am SICK of it. I will not let my children be sacrificial victims on this altar of greed.
You can argue all you want about how other countries have problems too, but from my perspective, America has slipped below, far below, the threshold for what is acceptable in a society. I have watched our not-so-slow descent into this over the last 30 years. All statistics bear out what I am saying. Vacation days, maternity leave, infant mortality, education, murders, income disparity, crumbling infrastructure, per capita incarceration rates, etc. These all point to the fact that we treat our own citizens like shit. No wonder we crap on each other too.
So I will be expatriating when I can, which hopefully won't be long. I will risk being put on a no-fly list because it is worth it to me to get my loved ones away from this roach motel.
I know I will catch a lot of shit for this rant, but I don't care. My Jewish blood sings out to me that t is time to catch the first thing smoking. Images of the Gulf of Mexico and news that we blithely killed another 30 or so with the latest drone attack in Pakistan in the continuing and ever-expanding War on Terror are the backdrop against which I write this -and it is enough. Obama sucked every last ounce of HOPE out of my heart to get me to work for his election (one of the last things me and my mom did together) and I have no "Hope(TM)" left for the US.
For those of you who wish to do the same thing or are interested in reading further, here is a good guide:
American Expatriation Guide
http://www.scribd.com/doc/30923462/American-Expatriation-Guide
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