A recent article in the Boston Globe (a response to the Romney tax disclosures) notes that:
“In fact, nearly half of US taxpayers will probably pay no taxes at all for 2011, including 24,000 in the top 1 percent of incomes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a think tank in Washington. Some low-income families even get back more than they pay because of the Earned Income Tax Credit and other programs.” Continue reading
On this last Sunday of January 2012, here at Isaac Brock Society, multiple threads seem to have converged on at least faint hopes that the US behemoth might turn to the sanity of residence-based taxation. Or not.
Some appear to hope that such a sea change might still solve problems they currently founder in, while others look toward (or have already realized) the certain freedom of consigning US citizenship to jettison. What is realistic?
Two academic articles offer a long view of where the United States has come from.
Unfortunately, this only pertains to corporations and doesn’t help us one iota. However, Camp seems to understand the necessity and the logic of why the shift from international to territorial-based taxation is what the US needs in terms of business. Why not citizens as well?
My question is, what could we propose in order to be considered for the same system? What do we have to offer that they would consider seriously enough to switch? Are we of any value to the country or are we just something to tax and label as rich, lazy cheats?
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=266168
excerpts:
Petros provides a scenario which would suggest that the Human Rights Act does not protect U.S. Citizens living in Canada, as they do not have equal opportunity with other individuals, because under the Tax Treaty the CRA will collect taxes for the IRS.
A comment on Update on the IRS FS for U.S. and Dual Citizens Living Outside The United States
The Tax Advocate within the IRS has written a report critical of the IRS in its handling of OVDP and OVDI participants and US taxpayers abroad identifying it as a “Most Serious Problem”. For my own purposes I’ve distilled into a few critical paragraphs: Continue reading
In his article Tax Evaders Renounce U.S. Citizenship Noel Brinkhoff writes:
Rather than deal with the complexities of U.S. tax law, Americans living overseas are increasingly renouncing their citizenship in order to avoid paying their income taxes.
Fortunately, the rest of the short article is a little bit better, as he refers to the complexity of the tax filing requirements and the IRS’s bait and switch tactics. Still, I am disgusted by the assumption of guilt that if you renounce you are a tax evader.
It’s funny that you can be a foreigner like me (originally from India, now a Canadian citizen) and do most of your business in the US and not get taxed on it. I run an internet company incorporated in Canada and almost all my customers are American. I don’t file anything with the IRS because legally I don’t have to.
But if you happen to have been born in the US or have an American parent and don’t earn income from there they still want to tax you. It’s like a penalty for having any American association. On top of that no foreigners will want to form a partnership with you due to FATCA. Continue reading
Roger Conklin responds to markpinetree who laments that the impression that most Americans have of US citizens abroad is that they are rich tax cheats, and says, “Lets work to clarify the issues!”
Roger Conklin responded JANUARY 28, 2012 AT 9:57 PM:
Oh how I wish you were right. But the perception cards are so stacked against us that it a task of inconceivable magnitude.
Several years back one Congresman, I have forgotten his name [Bill Alexander, see below], who had always won reelection by wide margins, took up our cause. He introduced legislation to abolish citizenship based taxation and replace it with the residence based taxation of every other country. He had no support from his congressional colleagues. It became a major issue in the next election with his opponent majoring on the fact that this Congressman was wasting his time helping American tax evaders living abroad rather than working on the issues important to his constituents in the district he represented. He lost his re-election, going down in an flames. That bitter lesson did not go unnoticed by others when going to run for re-election. It is an issue that just does not resonate positively with he voting public.
I started a forum post about this, but I feel that this is so important that it needs to be shared here to spread the word!
Everyone and their grandmother heard about SOPA and PIPA and the huge amount of publicity that was generated recently to kill the bills. But did you know that there is already a global agreement on the books called ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement)? No, this is not a US law – It’s worse: it is a multilateral treaty that has been negotiated over many years by the US, Canada, EU and others in almost absolute secrecy. One top EU official even resigned recently over how the negotiations were carried out.
There is a new website that launched several weeks ago that I highly recommend: isaacbrocksociety.com. The engines behind this site are people I know and it has good, first-hand information about
