Author Archives: Mark Twain

New Zealand’s financial industry invested 100 million NZD, whilst its government invest 20 million NZD to prevent Americans from sending their money to New Zealand to avoid taxation. Also, eligible Kiwis can be identified to pay tax to USA–to help USA tax Kiwis whom USA declares “United States Persons for Tax Purposes“. Such identified Kiwis can be forced to pay U.S. taxes while living in Kiwiland.

So far, by investigating the highest two US tax categories, we’ve seen that the only 0.274% of the first 81.1% of the expat population’s tax returns yield tax revenue to USA. Now, we investigate expats who may be exposed to USA’s 33% to 35% tax bracket—which comprises 1.9% of the US expat population. If a United States person lives in a country in this range, he could be exposed to USA taxation ranging from 0% all the way up to 6.9% (average 3.45%). These countries are identified to have taxes in this range (with percentages of the US expat population).

Total                1.9%
Colombia          0.7%
Guyana             0.0%
New Zealand   0.8%
Swaziland        0.0%
Venezuela        0.4%

New Zealand is the most significant in this group, and has a top marginal tax rate of 33%. Let’s compare that to America’s tax tables.

U.S. tax rates for single filers

America has a policy to require its citizens to pay additional tax to U.S.A. if the residence country of a U.S. citizen is not as high as the U.S. tax rate. It has about a $100,000 income exemption. Hence, a US person in New Zealand making  511,501 USD to 513,200 USD per year will be taxed by USA an additional 2% (a very narrow band worth considering insignificant).  For any income above $513,201 USD, USA will tax that person 6.9%. This means, that USA can only tax dual citizen Kiwis with incomes over $513,201 (763,000  NZD).

So, how many Kiwis have incomes over 763,000NZD? A: Far less than 1% of the Kiwi population, or less than 1% of the dual-citizen population.

New Zealand has 0.7658% of the US expat population. And therefore, less than 0.07658% of the U.S. expat population can be taxed 6.9% of their marginal income above $513,200. This is beginning to sound ridiculous–Just BEGINNING to sound ridiculous. The story can be no better than U.S. citizens living in Colombia (0.7%), Guyana (0.0%), Swaziland (0.0%), or Venezuela (0.4%). Less than 0.019% of the US expat population can be taxed maximum 6.9% for their incomes above $513,200.

In New Zealand—how many people is this really? Various estimates yield the quantity of U.S. citizens in New Zealand to be between 21,462 Kiwis BORN in USA, to 38,207 to 66,600 Kiwis with known and unknown US citizenship. USA could tax less than 1% of them.

USA could potentially tax less than 666 Kiwis 6.9% of their marginal income above $513,200.

The ridiculousness of America’s extra-territorial taxation glares in New Zealand.

New Zealand has self-paid more than 120 million NZD to help America collect taxes from less than 666 rich dual-citizen Kiwis.

No matter how much money the IRS will lose, the IRS, Washington, and mainstream media want to tax US expats. The IRS and Washington want a government jobs program for accountants in the public and private sectors. And FATCA is the enforcement tool of USA’s stupid extra-territorial personal income tax system of Citizenship-Based-Taxation (CBT) (or US-person Based Taxation).

Note that USA and Eritrea are the only governments of the world that tax their expatriates and emigrants.  But is USA making any money (tax revenue) out of the effort?

America’s first goal is to use U.S. expat citizens to fund the U.S. tax-preparer industry. A typical taxpayer is required to pay about $500 a year to hire a U.S. tax professional to fill out expat tax forms that are exponentially more complicated than tax forms for Homelanders. USA wants for the entire adult (over 25 yrs) U.S. expat population to pay for this. So, the compliance industry is fleecing the citizenry right good–a wealth transfer from those of modest means to tax preparation corporations (so what else is new?). But is the IRS gaining revenue?

We can look at what IRS costs are incurred, assuming that the IRS is successful in forcing every tax-eligible expat to file. The IRS is able to estimate the cost of each filer–unfortunately the IRS does not share those numbers with the public (it would defeat its self-serving job-security interest). Note that expat returns are at least doubly complicated than those of homelanders. Normally, the poor would be relieved of their need to file–-but with Obamacare, even the poor are required to file expat exemption papers. For example, expats can never be eligible for Obamacare, yet expats who file must file a form to exempt themselves from Obamacare penalties.  Hence, it is likely that the entire adult expat population will file forms which can give IRS job security. 56% of the world are adults above 24 yrs, and there are 8.7 million U.S. expats. One could expand the analysis to try to determine the number of “US persons”, but this article will limit the scope to US citizen expats. (8.7 million)(0.56)* (processing cost of one filer)(doubled)(% above filing threshold).

In addition, there is a similar-but-different population of FBAR filers to consider. Each FBAR of every account of every expat who possesses more than $10,000 of financial wealth must also be processed. These FBARs must be filed and compared to the data which is obtained through the FATCA ethnic-identification system.  FATCA’s public costs could also be considered in the calculation–FATCA is a big loser to the world’s economies. FATCA’s costs to the IRS government system are partly addressed in Wikipedia. However, “The I.R.S. “has been unable to ascertain all potential costs beyond those for IT resources”.

It’s important to remember that, despite media propoganda, FATCA and FBAR are not taxes and do not create tax revenue. They are expensive unconstitutional enforcement means of the money-losing extra-territorial tax regime system. Although sold to the public as revenue-enhancers by “increasing tax revenues”, enforcement methods and control systems always only add costs. This government doublespeak shows up in every Congressional spending bill (correctly stated as not a tax) but as “revenue enhancement”.

But does America’s extra-territorial taxation system take in any money? If America succeeds with its FATCA and finds ALL of its 8.7 million expat-chattel in the world, how many dineros will it bring to itself? Let’s calculate some examples using IRS tax tables.

53.7% of US expats live in countries which have higher marginal tax rates than USA’s top 39.6% rate. No matter what their income, US cannot tax them up. More than half of the people filing expat taxes should (rightly) owe nothing. Zilch. Zippo.

27.4% of US expats live in countries with tax brackets in the 35% to 39.6% region. With USA’s taxing-up method, it could gain a maximum of 4.6% tax (average 2.3%) from the richest of any residents. But a single person must make over $413,200 per year to pass this 35% marginal-tax threshold—however that person can exclude at least $100,000, so a person must make more than $513,200 per year to be taxed in this bracket. The only significant country in this category is Mexico, where 52.3% of the population is below the poverty line and 90% earn less than $33,000 per year. In order for America to get any money out of Mexico, they would have to fleece Mexico’s 1%’er’s . So, in Mexico, more than 99% of the US-expat tax filings would be wasted energy. To know how much money America could squeeze out of Mexico, one would have know the percentage of 1%ers who are dual citizens. The quantity of Mexican US persons to be taxed becomes negligible.

The other cash cows in this category include Algeria, Argentina, Cyprus, Ecuador, Morocco, Norway, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam. How many Turks or Argentinians could America fleece? (oops, side point: I forgot to mention that the IRS disallows tax credits for the Norwegian 7.8% tax it labels “social tax”. The IRS wrongly taxes Norwegian residents due to a loophole it wrote into tax treaties and tax regs)

Ok, so we’ve gone through 81.1% of the expat population’s tax returns — and the only thing that has been achieved is that 80.826% have (rightly) contributed no tax revenue to USA and less than 0.274% may have (unrightly) been taxed-up by USA by a tax ranging from 0% to 4.6% of their annual incomes.  Oops, I forgot — only 56% of that population are adults. This whopping sum ought to pay for a few dozen aeronautical toilet seats.

I hope that you are beginning to see the ridiculousness of the situation. The GAO has full access to this type of data, and should have been able to calculate this same data. They should have been realizing that the costs of processing millions of returns is ridiculously high in comparison with the ridiculously low revenue potential to be gained from fleecing the 1%’er expats in Algeria, Norway, or Vietnam.

Well, politics is an endless source of black humor. You ought to know that the story just gets more and more ridiculous if one analyzes it further.

America’s extra-territorial US-person-based taxation (CBT) is a big big loser for America. And CBT helps even more to show that the taxing decision makers in Washington are truly a bunch of losers.

“In this Essay, Professor Patrick Weil reexamines the constitutional function of the passport in relation to American citizenship. The State Department recently developed a policy of passport revocation whereby some Americans are transformed into de facto stateless persons….

……”

http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/citizenship-passports-and-the-legal-identity-of-americans

The article approaches the issue of revoking passports for any reason. Revoking passports of unsuspecting U.S. citizens overseas was enacted in the 2015 FAST Act. If a person owes $50,000 in taxes, a passport may be revoked. In the propoganda that was released with the passing of the bill, it was said that this bill was written to catch people in America who had not paid their taxes and who may want to flee the country. However, the bill has lots of text relating to the revocation of the passport for all purposes except for the expat to return to the Homeland. This bill was written to enforce the FATCA dragnet.

The paper:

Conclusion

“The State Department seems to be abusing its power with passport revocation—unknowingly in the case of Snowden, as the Department could at first glance rely on a jurisprudence that seemed until recently to favor executive power, and willfully in the case of the Yemeni Americans. It therefore seems that it is time for courts confronted with passport revocations to reexamine the constitutional function of the passport and its status in relation to American citizens who, since Afroyim, have gained more protection over their citizenship in relation to the state—including in relation to the Secretary of State. Today it is commonplace to say that new technologies infringe upon civil liberties—they often do. However, in the case of passports and the essential right of Americans to maintain a legal identity, new technologies offer an avenue to protect that very right. By affirming both that a passport belongs among the privileges and immunities of an American abroad and that the Secretary of State cannot revoke a passport as a matter of administrative routine, courts could make the passport an almost inalienable auxiliary of the American citizen abroad: the symbol and substance of an irreducible citizenship which the Supreme Court has already proclaimed.”

SWeden pays 73,700 USD per each resident adult US-citizen immigrant to be located with the #FATCA ethnic-identification system. Is Sweden offshore? (I had always thought that Sweden was on the continent of Europe). (Total FATCA implementation costs in Sweden are estimated to be greater than 7.61 billion SEK.)

Would it be at all possible to dispel any myth that residents in USA are sending their money to SWeden to avoid taxation? Has no one in Washington or Stockholm yet realized that SWeden has the highest personal tax rate in the world?

FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, is an enforcement tool of the requirements of Americans to report their “foreign” bank accounts. Since US has extraterritorial taxation based upon citizenship, these reports are required of all US citizens and all US persons living throughout the world or in Sweden.  “Foreign” and “offshore” are defined as anything that is not in American. Canada is “offshore’ and, Mexico is “offshore”, and the Swedish accounts of a dual citizen living in Sweden are also considered both “offshore” and “foreign” according to the IRS and its captive media. US persons are required to fill out the Foreign Bank Account Report FBAR at the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen). Those that have not filed FBARs are eligible for jail terms, or fines reaching 300% of a persons asset value.  A child is responsible for filing its own FBAR and is not exempted from the penalties.  FBARs are required to be filed electronically at the FinCen website. Additionally, qualified “rich” US persons (those with over $200,000) are required to have also filed IRS form 8938, with an additional penalty structure.

The Swedish government administration stated that the costs of implementation should be considered versus the threatened 30% sanctioned tax which could be applied for non-compliance.

Sweden could not estimate the business effect of FATCA, despite that Swedish law requires that the business impact must be evaluated for legislations. In following discussions, it was estimated that each small financial institute (comprising 95% of the FFI’s) would incur 1 million SEK yearly FATCA administration costs. (Documentation of the costs to larger institutions has not been located.) IRS lists 744 FFI’s to date, yielding a minimum estimated yearly cost of 744 million SEK (excludes the cost of the 5% larger institutions), or 7.44 billion SEK over 10 years. The costs to the Swedish government were estimated to be above 15 million SEK for implementation and 15 million SEK per year thereafter, for a 10 year public cost of 165 million SEK. Total FATCA implementation costs in Sweden are estimated to be greater than 7.61 billion SEK.

As Sweden approaches a cashless society, nearly every resident has a bank account, yet only the 82.9% over 15 yrs old are considered further in this analysis.

With 9,784,445 inhabitants and 17,000 resident U.S. citizens, the Swedish government cost is 777 SEK per capita, 447,700 SEK per resident US-citizen resident and 937 SEK per adult Swedish account, or an astounding 539,984 SEK per adult resident U.S.-person account.

Using the 6-yr average of IRS exchange rates (7.33 SEK/USD), this yields the cost of 73,700 USD to locate each adult resident US-person account.

Would it not have been better for Sweden to just hand over 761 million SEK to USA each year—as a tax for having allowed immigration and emigration with USA?

But, FATCA is about finding rich offshore tax evaders! They are sending their money to Sweden—in order to avoid taxation! Believe it! Believe it! You should be believing all of the FATCA “offshore” media propoganda for Sweden. They are not paying their fair share! We need to get every last PESO out of them!

Who are they actually going to find? The objective is to find all suspected U.S. persons living in Sweden and any suspected Swedes living in USA.

They will find many “real Swedes” have had no control over their Swedish parent’s sexual lust to procreate in America. Thousands of “real Swedes” have studied or worked temporarily in USA, and begat children upon U.S. soil.

They may also find about 51,000 SWedish-citizen schmucks living in The Land of the Free as expats. I suppose that Obama wants to find them, too. There ought to be a few of those pesky buggers with checking accounts back in Du gamla du Fria, due to their devious history of once having lived someplace other than America. They might have inherited something from grandma, have a summer house, or might even be renting out their Swedish family home in their absence. Somehow, these terrible immigrants in America need to be located and punished for their sins.

FATCA looks for “indicia” of these pesky U.S. persons.
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FATCA is the method of identifying suspected U.S. persons, who might be residing outside of USA–working and saving in non-American financial institutions.

As in the analysis of the other countries, one first must ask if we could dispel any myth that there are Americans in America who are sending their money to Australia — in order to avoid taxation.

Australia: The costs in Australia are estimated to be 255 million AUS for implementation, and 22.7 million AUS for each year of maintenance. Over 10 years, this totals 482.68 million AUS. With 77,000 resident US citizens (54% of whom are of dual citizenship) and known population of 24,003,100, the implementation cost is 6,270 AUS per residing U.S. citizen, 11,590 AUS per U.S.-person account, or 20.2 AUS per capita. The most representative developed country has 661 bank accounts per 1000 adults, and Australia has 82.1% population above 15 years old (adults). This yields estimated 41, 700 US-citizen bank customers in Australia, or a FATCA implementation cost of 37.3 AUS per customer.

AS 3668 FFI’s are currently registered, the estimated FATCA cost per FFI is 132,000 AUS per FFI.

The same analysis showed that costs without the IGA 477 million AUS for implementation, and 58.8 million AUS for each year of maintenance. ($1.066 billion AUS total) would have been 44,4 AUS per capita, 81.1 AUS per customer, or 13,800 AUS per resident U.S. citizen, or 25, 600 AUS per U.S.-person account . This is the only published non-IGA country cost estimation identified.

Without an IGA, the estimated FATCA cost per FFI is 291,000 AUS.

If it could have been assumed that one person had only one account, Australia still could only have said to have succeeded to locate only 30,000 of those US citizens (72% effectiveness) in its first FATCA submission to USA.  (updated per commenter) It was determined that each located U.S. citizen bank account averaged 160,000 AUS—hardly those rich 1%’ers.

Australia is paying dearly to identify its minorities for the benefit of an intrusive foreign government.

p.s. Recently, it was pointed out as to where to find foreign-born population in the USA. 84,368 +/-4,780
residents of USA are counted to have been born in Australia as non-US citizen Australians. This quantity is not significant (less than 1%) in the above calculations. Data can be found at

http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_14_1YR_B05006&prodType=table

https://www.census.gov/topics/population/foreign-born/about.html

Note that, indeed, FATCA’s objective is also to locate foreign-born persons residing in USA.  Like US persons living in Australia, Australians living in USA are required to file their FBARs & 8938’s and all of their other tax papers. Many of these persons have inheritances and savings and checking accounts from their former lives and for their current life. Perhaps they have summer houses or inherited family homes or checking accounts for supporting children who are studying in Australia. These persons indeed are due to report their situations to the IRS, yet they are far from “those offshore tax evaders” for which FATCA propoganda is claiming.

482,680,000 / (77,000 + 84,638 ) yields 2986 AUS per the FATCA-indicia objects (US citizens in Australia + Australian-born persons in USA) .

Here is the full Audio for the event. Albright represented Clinton. Her response to the questions was quite cold and standoffish.
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Is Obama picking Merkel’s pocket? Germany paid 656 million EUR to help America collect supposed 92 million EUR from dual US/German citizens. German bank customers each paid 12 EUR for the privilege of supporting Barack’s budget.

Do you suppose that we could immediately dispel any myth that Americans in America are sending their money to Germany to avoid taxation? I know it might be hard for a guy like Mythster Stack, but let’s try.

USA’s estimated FATCA take was 8.7 billion USD over 11 years (or 7.9 billion USD over 10 years). (Never mind that all of that supposed revenue disappears by lost taxation of US-owned foreign financial institutions) Knowing that “fair share” is a common theme of the Obama administration, Germany should be assumed to provide its per-capita share of FATCA income. (Well, then again, it could mean more, since, to Obama, “fair share” means that someone other than he or his hangers-on have to foot the bill for his largesse). Germany’s population is 1.16% of the non-US world population. Hence, the theoretical Obama FATCA take from Germany ought to be 91,640,000 USD. At the averaged exchange rates of the IRS itself, Obama’s FATCA Euro take out of Germany is a measly 74, 700,000 EUR.

(alternatively, let’s suppose that Germany’s “fair share” is as 1 country of the 190 countries of the world. This means that Germany might be contributing 41,600,000 USD / 33,800,000 EUR.)

This is a method of analyzing German FACTA implementation costs. German FATCA implementation was estimated to be 386 million EUR upfront, and 30 million EUR per year thereafter: 656 million EUR over a standard 10 years.  Knowing that interest rates are near zero, there is no need to consider Present Values.

So, Obama required Germany to pay 656 million EUR so as to help USA get 74,700,000 EUR? Obama could have just done the greatest economic con ever done on another country.  Obama enacted this con with LOADS of tax propaganda, calling countries such as Germany “offshore”, that Americans were sending their money to Germany in order to avoid taxation. In reality, all Obama was doing was to get Germany’s banks to identify the 109,000 Americans living in Germany.

Whaddya say we just stop here and let this ludicrousness stand for itself? Well, no, it all just gets worse.

Germany’s EU rep says that it has to “thank America for this (FATCA)” (at 49:00 of this video).
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A recent method of combatting propaganda has been to create fact checking sites. Every time a politician or media hack opens his fat mouth, countless people run to the internet to find someone who has fact-checked things on that topic.

Would it not be smart to fact check the common propaganda out there? Shouldn’t it be searchable as factchecking?

Perhaps it would be a good idea for any writers to pick a single narrow topic and present a fact-checking answer. The title of the post should indicate that it is a fact-checker. Then, when any hack spouts off, people can use their search engines and land on Isaac Brock and receive a properly-researched fact check.

Many of the Brock researchers are capable of this. There are also a number of writers available who are capable of taking up previous research and summarizing it and making it public-reading-friendly.

Pick a narrow topic and summarize the REAL facts. For example: “All expats are rich” or “People are leaving America to avoid taxation”. Take only one topic, manage your time, and publish.

Just make the title search-friendly, focusing upon the media myth or media propaganda, and include such things in the title and body as Fact Check, FactCheck, #FactCheck, and such.

You may choose a generic topic, or pick a particular current propaganda piece and address it. One day, there might be a base of generic writings which can be used as references for any specific media or political hack that spouts nonsense.

Take a look at the approaches of

http://www.snopes.com/

http://www.politifact.com/

http://www.factcheck.org/

and the others.

IS ANYBODY GAME?