6 thoughts on “The American Public: SOLD on the Auction Block”

1. Amazing post.

   Admire the thinking outside the box – that the true ‘value’ of FATCA can be expressed in the size of the gain to its range of supporters that goes beyond the politicians and the US Treasury – including the value to US media, homelander apologist academics/ “researchers” writing in US tax journals and churning out US homelander navel-gazing, flag waving, secondhand IRS/Treasury propaganda promulgated and accepted for publication without robust numbers or foundation or actual critical analysis). FATCA truly is the ‘gift’ that keeps on giving to the interest groups you name.

   As you so ably illustrate – the true ‘value’ of FATCA is in the eye of those who stand to gain – and who are invested in generating even more inflated imaginary numbers to sell to the public – a perfect scheme in that none of whom those actually afflicted by it have any traction or organized power – we are not unions, media, US politicians, tax agencies, foreign governments looking for US favour, etc. Attack the assets of people who have no real recourse or representation. Get those with no representation or voice to pay the US bill forever and ever and ever. Enlist and extort their own home governments to name their price for collaboration (an oil pipeline’s worth of inducement plus you get to keep your kneecaps?) and eh voila – another FATCA IGA signed, and millions of Canadians, and British and New Zealander and other citizens and residents around the globe are suddenly redefined as ‘US taxable persons’ in a special lower class of citizenship in their own homes – even if they were born there.

   Suddenly, the US ‘right’ to invent and enforce any system of extraterritorial lifelong (and beyond) dominion over the local already once-taxed assets of everyone else on the planet is of urgent interest and pressing priority for Canadian MPs – who are willing to go on video record to say so to their own fellow Canadians http://www.adcs-adsc.ca/Parliament.html . Bankers are by proxy making Canadian foreign policy and citizenship and tax laws – in order to keep their own self interested schemes going. Banking and the ‘right’ to access and make profits in the US financial markets is elevated over ALL other human and civil rights – as the FATCA IGA is written to supercede ANY and ALL Canadian laws that it is in conflict with.

   Somebody needs to write this book about the FATCA boondoggle.

2. What most every citizen of the U.S. at home or abroad fails to understand is this. The one and only job of any politician is to be re elected every election until they are too old to walk and then to have the taxpayer push them in a wheel chair until they die.
   How else could a bunch of politicians who had a favorability rating of 9% keep getting sent back to D.C.?
   They use the free mail they granted themselves, They keep certain Income Tax provisions renewable on a two year basis and will not renew them unless they get a generous campaign contribution. Oh it is legal, they made it so for themselves only…….Why else do you think I refer to them as D.C.Pukes? They really make most of us want to throw up, or Puke to use the vulgar version that they inspire.
   WHY ELSE WOULD THEY CONSTANTLY REJECT THE CLEANEST, BEST, FAIREST, MOST EQUITABLE, CHEAPEST, TAX EVER IMAGINED. Yes I am talking about the FairTax.

3. Banc D’, many thanks for your thoughtful posting.

   Badger, your comments also jogged my memory about an insightful post Mark Nestmann sent out in March of this year on the supposed amount of money the US has lost to tax havens, and which the media have popularized as the reason for the Fatca hunt.
   (I will abridge for expedience’s sake).

   Mark writes:
   “In 2008, the US Senate issued a report entitled Tax Haven Banks and US Tax Compliance. It estimated the annual loss to the US Treasury from offshore tax evasion at that time to be $100 billion. Yet the only evidence the report presented to support this monumental figure was in a footnote citing five magazine articles, none of which provided any guidance as to how the $100 billion figure was calculated.”

   Despite the lack of evidence, the media ran with the number never to look back again.
   In the summer of 2013, however, there was a break on the source of the information.

   Mark continues:
   “A colleague of mine found out that the guy who started all this – Jack Blum – would be speaking at an offshore conference. At my request, he asked Blum to give an on-the-record response on how he came up with his original $70 billion estimate. After dodging the question once, Blum finally admitted, ‘I guessed.’ … The centerpiece of the US Treasury’s “War on Offshore” is based on a friggin’ guess! And on the strength of this initial guess, the number has risen steadily from $70 billion to $100 billion to a mind-blowing total of $150 billion.”

   Mark calculates what this number actually means: the equivalent of USD 38 trillion –or 60% of global GDP– floating around the global financial system invisible to all tax authorities. A highly unlikely proposition…

   The usual suspect lobbyists nonetheless have gotten in line to milk the new tax revenues. To them, however Mark has a pointed message: “don’t count on that $150 billion anytime soon. It doesn’t exist and likely never will.”

4. @Sally1
   Your anecdote puts me in mind of Victoria’s story of appearing before the Joint Committee on Taxation. She felt she needed to have hard numbers proving that a switch from CBT to RBT would be revenue neutral.

   Well, it seems that providing hard numbers is the wrong approach. All that’s needed is someone to successfully launch a rumour that a CBT-RBT switch would produce a tax windfall.

   So a U.S. switch to Residence Based Taxation would bring in an extra $250 billion, wouldn’t it?

5. Shovel, exactly as you say. To try and obtain hard numbers, as Victoria suggested, albeit honourable, is making things extra hard for ourselves. These people are playing a different game: they’re making things up as they go along Since they know that the media defer to government, they can float “best guesses” –i.e., lies– until the cows come home. No one checks their numbers. sources, or assumptions. Over 7 milion so-called “US persons” (many more if we include green card holders and all affected families and institutions) instantly get thrown under the bus and become roadkill because of someone’s “guess”… Aren’t the web of lies coming out about Obamacare, courtesy of Jonathan Gruber’s unwitting unveiling, along the same lines? And isn’t this “guess” (i.e., fabrication) plenty evidence to pick apart this “law” and the IGA faux treaties, while making the case for RBT to prevent such future abuses?

6. Sally1 and Shovel,

   I like —

   …while making the case for RBT to prevent such future abuses!