Well it seems that the big headline today in U.S. international commerce is a new proposed free trade deal between the U.S. and the evil socialist European states. I don’t understand though how America cannot see that its desire for more free trade is inconsistent with FATCA.
Why should U.S. goods be able to move freely around the world while U.S. persons and their capital are forbidden to leave the homeland. And if they should have the temerity to leave anyway then they are punished for doing so. More importantly is it possible for U.S. goods to move around the world if U.S. persons aren’t allowed to accompany them?
Goods come back to the US in the form of wealth/money. People, often, don’t come back in any form. This is about the exchange. Emigration is not an exchange really. It flows outward and benefits the new country far more than than old one. Things like “goodwill” and the promotion of that are not seen by the USG as a hard currency/valuable probably owing to the peculiar blindspot that USPs in general have about themselves and how the rest of the world sees them.
Given the grave financial situation that the USG finds itself in, the casual attitude about expatriation it has mostly can’t continue anymore. Hence the jihad. But goods are allowed to find new homes elsewhere just so long as payment for those goods comes back to the homeland.
I like your questions @recalcitrant; “Why should U.S. goods be able to move freely around the world while U.S. persons and their capital are forbidden to leave the homeland”.. ..”More importantly is it possible for U.S. goods to move around the world if U.S. persons aren’t allowed to accompany them?”
So basically, the US is restricting the flow of US labour and persons – through making it very difficult for us to live outside its borders – even for those who were already born and live lifelong ‘abroad’ in other countries, and restricting our ‘US’ capital (even though our individual capital cannot be defined as ‘US’ in any way except that we own it and we’re ‘owned’ by the US), but it wants to move US goods.
Stupid and shortsighted. As Roger and the other business leaders tried to tell them more than 30 years ago: you only sell goods and enter into other markets effectively by sending your representatives too. You spread ideas and culture and other intangibles via the persons who represent and embody them abroad. Otherwise, you’re committed to paying and employing non-US middlemen. And those with dual citizenships, and experience, with lives lived abroad, but with understanding of US culture are the best situated to understand and act to facilitate international exchanges as cultural translators. That would be an international equivalent of social networking, and a form of word of mouth marketing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word-of-mouth_marketing .
I always found it ridiculously ironic that Timothy Geithner grew up ‘abroad’, and majored in international studies; “Born to a pianist and international development official for the U.S. government, he spent most of his childhood traveling to different foreign countries. He spent time in Zimbabwe, India and Thailand during his adolescence, and soon became interested in international relationships. After graduating … with a B.A. in government and Asian studies, he attained his master’s degree in international economics and East Asian studies. (see “http://www.biography.com/people/timothy-geithner-391494 ). Despite that, he remained adamant about making any meaningful distinction between life inside the US for residents, and the necessities of life for those born and/or living in other countries. I’ll never forget how he stonewalled Carolyn Maloney when she confronted him with the denial of access to banking that ordinary US persons in other countries were facing, and how he demonstrated that this was of no concern to him – which as Treasury Secretary – constituted an official policy position. See: http://youtu.be/kHHjv2HJ4pw
He has to have been very aware of the ways in which US domestic laws, and most especially US tax and banking laws were in essential conflict with the laws and systems of other countries. Despite growing up abroad and deciding to study international issues, he chose to stay inside the US, living in a homogeneous US place, and enforcing inappropriate laws harshly and unjustly on those abroad.
Timothy Geithner just demonstrated that American exceptionalist idea of following your own self-interest to the money/power. In other words, he took care of himself and his own, which is exactly what off-shore citizens are doing when they relinquish or renounce. I guess one could say that Timmy is leading by example.
American govt and business is guided by the short term payoff. It’s been that way for decades and just gets worse.
quantity of goods moved is fairly flat (perhaps the World can only buy so much stuff?). Services have had to take up the slack in the world’s economies since the 70’s. If a business discussion goes with only a discussion on goods, it means the writers forgot what they read in college.
Good luck Obama!!!!! 🙂
US goods account for 10% of EU imports. The US has a population of 310 million people.
Swiss and Norwegian goods each account for 5% of EU imports (10% combined). Switzerland has 8 million people, Norway has 5 million people (13 million combined).
In essence, the EU imports more goods from EFTA (a group of 4 small countries with 13.5 million people), than it does from the US in total monetary value!!!!!
Dream on Obama, citizenship-based taxation will make your call one long wet dream.
Take a look at Switzerland. 25% of Swiss residents are non-Swiss citizens and 10% of Swiss citizens are non-Swiss residents. That, my friends, is a dynamic 21st century globalized and prosperous country.
@Mark Twain, I didn’t study business or anything related, but, re; “If a business discussion goes with only a discussion on goods, it means the writers forgot what they read in college.”
Thanks for pointing that out. Physical goods can be shipped on their own and received by non-US people on the other end. But services – and the ‘knowledge goods’ and skills that are embodied in the mind and physical person of a US individual are much harder to control and command. It is true that with technology, more of this can be done remotely, but much is still done face to face, onsite. The US can control goods, and capital, but it cannot as effectively control our ideas, knowledge, values, beliefs and attitudes ‘abroad’. If we decide that our interests and the official US interests diverge and cannot be reconciled, it will be difficult for them to ‘enforce’ anything different. The US can use legal and physical force to coerce us to comply, but that can only go so far when we’re outside it. It cannot compel our non-US family and friends – who now are more likely to hold anti-American views – and it confirms those views in those who already held them, and convinces the mushy middle to take an antagonistic position.
At this point, everything the US is doing to those of us outside its borders is only working harder towards achieving a negative result: by denying people access to their own earned post-tax assets, denying them the opportunity that everyone else inside the US has to save for the future and for their family security and education, denying people freedom of movement, claiming tax rights to their children, denying them the right to assist other family members in incapacity, denying them the right to have business partners, take a job with signatory duties, hold joint accounts with non-US people, etc. It only creates anger, fear, anxiety, and resentment.
And, I don’t think that those who are and have been scarred by this experience are going to ‘forget and forgive’. It has been so unnecessary, and so lacking in any kind of logic or ethics, that there is no possible way to rationalize what is happening. The US, IRS, Treasury etc. have just lost the war for our ‘hearts and minds’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_and_Minds_%28Vietnam%29 .
We are just a convenient diversion and scapegoats for the bigger fish that are ‘too big to prosecute’.
Good points, Badger. I know I won’t forgive and forget.
Talk again today about a deal with Switzerland for a sort of NAFTA extension. Don’t know what this means, détails are vague.
There is a similar theme article on the WSJ site
A Trade Deal Worth Making
Only 3 comments, but long term readers here should recognize good ole Roger.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a front-page article titled “Broad Trade Deal on Table.” I posted my tongue-in-cheek comments to the effect that if the US won’t abolish its unique citizenship-based taxation which makes it impossible for US citizens to survive if they take advantage of a Free Trade Agreement with the EU, then in negotiating this agreement the US should insist that the EU countries adopt the US system of citizenship based taxation, FBARs FATCA and all, so citizens of the EU countries can’t survive if they come to the US to take advantage of Free Trade and peddle their wares either. To access this article and the posted comments, go to
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887324162304578301913107784742-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwNDExNDQyWj.html?mod=wsj_valettop_email, and add yor own comment if you feel so inclined.. You may also be able to access it at: WSJ.com – Opinion Europe: A Trade Deal Worth Making .
Roger writes it as a joke … but there’s people out there for whom it’s a deadly serious tax policy suggestion, in particular certain members of the Tax Justice Network like Richard Murphy. Like the old saying goes, “Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine kook.”
What a joke this would be. Micheline Calmy-Rey (President of Switzerland for 2011) proposed something like this to the US and the US told her to take a hike. Why is the US going after this now? OOOOH, you can have free trade with us (but the catch-22 is that we will FATBARDT you).
Switzerland has for several months been negotiating a free trade deal with China. Last year at about this time it was announced that it expected to have a deal by the end of 2012, but it missed that objective. I haven’t seen anythig recently in the news, but I do know that such an agreement was supported by the Swiss labor leaders. Switzerland always has a strong world trade suirplus and it has had a trade surplus with China almost since the days when China began to open up.
Switzerland has many expats around the world and it treats its diaspora very well. They take pride in the factg that their overseas citizens maintain close contact with their conuslates and embassies and that they are able to maintain excellent records on the names and addresses of Swiss living abroad.
Using the definition Albert Einstein gave for insanity,”doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is the classic definition of insanity”, we have had nothing but insane leaders since FATCA and FBAR were conceived in the devils workshop, Washington D.C.
Many of us have dealt with the mentally ill. Whatever they think becomes fact, in their minds, and no matter how much we try to reason with them, they continue on their destructive path. For us as families, mental illness only destroys the small group, but insanity at the National level, destroys the country.
I suppose you’d have to have some form of mental disease to run for national office, but sane people may become mentally ill just from the structure they find themselves in, after they are elected.
Either way we are all in the nightmare created by the widespread mental illness that afflicts our congress and executive branch of government, and yes greed is a mental illness, if taken to its logical conclusion.