The Government Printing Office has finally published the 284 pages of the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ bill we discussed earlier this month. For those who don’t recall, this bill includes provisions, as the CPC put it, to “Close Exclusion of Foreign-Earned Income Loophole”. I won’t bother quoting this bill at length since there’s nothing surprising in its the contents (aside from the hilariously non sequitur title: “Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures Act”), but the list of sponsors is rather interesting in one regard: a third of them are children or grandchildren of immigrants.
In more detail, the list of people responsible for this “nuclear” attack on U.S. Persons abroad includes:
- Judy Chu (D-CA), whose parents are from Guangdong, China;
- Steve Cohen (D-TN) — a putative member of the utterly useless Americans Abroad Caucus — who is the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Poland;
- Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), whose father was a Mexican guest worker who came to the U.S. through the Bracero Program;
- And last but not least, Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), the daughter of Soviet émigrés — yet another member of the Americans Abroad Caucus so helpfully “looking out” for the interests of actual Americans abroad.
There’s also Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), who is a migrant in the cultural sense of the word, but not an immigrant in the juridical sense of the word: his parents come from Puerto Rico, part of the United States and of course — as Roger Conklin points out — one of the only places in the solar system that an American can move to and not have to deal with the Interplanetary Revenue Service anymore. The remainder of the sponsors are pretty much the usual suspects from the CPC’s 2012 attempt to repeal the FEIE: Keith Ellison (D-MN), John Conyers (D-MI), Jim McDermott (D-WA), Jerrold Nadler and Yvette Clarke (both D-NY), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Ed Markey (D-MA), Lacy Clay (D-MO), Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), and Alan Grayson (D-FL).
Of course, none of these politicians’ forebears — let alone the politicians themselves — had to pay taxes to their ancestral countries after leaving to seek a better life. Yet they smear it as a “tax loophole” when American emigrants and their children do the exact same thing in Canada or dozens of other lands. This is an example of a more general phenomenon in U.S. politics: the children of the previous generation of people with connections to foreign countries are the most active in demonising the current generation of people with connections to foreign countries.
@recal
i don’t disagree. but you’re dodging the point. the FEIE is a loophole.
80% of USPA’s enjoy it’s comforts and it is often cited by homelanders as a “huge break”. so it serves to create complacency over the injustice and inequity of citizenship based taxation and the necessarily orwellian world that must be created to enforce such a system.
it’s time for the FEIE to go away. it’s time for unified resistance and all of the well deserved consequences for the stupidity and greed that would hold such a system in place.
@orwell says- I agree with you about the elimination of the FEIE. However where I disagree is on the issue of whether or not the FEIE is a real loophole or one of the biggest lies that has ever been perpetrated by the U.S. government?
If it is fundamentally impossible for any government to enact any taxation policies with regards to the accounts that a U.S. person holds with the treasury of another country then it of necessity follows that the FEIE is one big lie. What I want is for the U.S. government to acknowledge that it has no legal right to regulate any relationships that a U.S. person may have with another country’s treasury. Even if you still reside within the U.S. but especially when you no longer live within the U.S.
The FEIE is no comfort and it is certainly no break. Rather it is a complete farce.
Strict territorial taxation is the only legal and morally justifiable mode of operation. The U.S. has to stop being a freeloader at the door of the treasury operations of other sovereign nations.
Patrick Henry. You make some good points. But I would not trust Wikipedia as a good source for American history, nor statements written by the leaders of the time who would directly benefit from separating from Britain. It would also be very easy for leaders who benefited from slavery or Indian land acquisition to make taxation the issue. It should also be said that several areas of Britain were also not represented in the parliament even though they were taxed at a higher rate than the colonies. I find it hard to trust American sources of its own history. There is such a tendency to disinformation. A British perspective on this might be interesting. Don’t get me wrong, I admire a great deal about what America has contributed to the world. But my ancestors were loyalists who had direct experience with the early colonists who cheated them severely ( particularly landowners) and who robbed them of their lands and terrorized them incessantly. Many wealthy landowners benefited from the results of the revolution. There is more to the revolution than just taxation.
@recal
So let the FEIE go.
It’s illegitimate.
@John Green
I agree wikipedia is not by any means an authoritative source. I also agree that after the war the rebels went after the loyalists with a vengeance. America’s war for for independence, like all wars included the good, the bad, and the ugly (on all sides).
Moreover, America’s founders were by no means united. The federalists wanted a strong central government while the anti-federalists wanted a confederation. The federalists had to compromise with the Bill of Rights but for the most part got their way. Later the outcome of the Civil War further strengthened the power of the central government.
As I recall, Petros once wrote that America began as a Libertarian state. I believe that for the most part, it tried to start that way. However, there is nothing Libertarian about America any more.
It is now a Fascist state ruled by the big banks, the war industry, energy companies, pharmaceutical industry and of course the all too powerful law and accounting firms.
Loophole: “2: a means of escape; especially : an ambiguity or omission in the text through which the intent of a statute, contract, or obligation may be evaded ” — Webster’s
The FEIE is not a loophole. It is not an ambiguity or omission in the law. It was a fully-intentioned piece of legislation.
What it is, on the other hand, is a half-measure. It should be replaced by residency-based taxation.
But it is not a loophole.
@foo
you’re right. it was fully intentioned when it was created by Kennedy. it is not intended anymore.
it is bad law. write a law that is aimed at 3% and you have a bill of attainder. write a law for 100% and good or bad, it is not a bill of attainder. write a law for 100% and write a second law that excludes 97% and there is no bill of attainder, however, the exclusion law is a bad law. that’s what FEIE is.