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0 pointsmartey12y ago0 comments

> It is as though your 'home state' continued to tax you (or make you file paperwork) long after you've moved to California.

This is an imperfect analogy (since there is not really a concept of "citizenship" for individual US states), but note that claiming residency in one state while living in another will often require you to pay taxes in both.

> Nobody else (worldwide) does this. It doesn't make any sense.

I think it is pretty clear its purpose is to prevent US citizens from deciding to live abroad in order to pay less income tax. The legislation that requires US citizens to report foreign bank accounts (which some of the people in the BBC article mention) is called the "Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act" [1] is supposed to prevent all citizens from committing tax evasion by hiding funds in foreign bank accounts.

I think there are multiple reasons why you or others could argue that these rules are counterproductive [2] or otherwise detrimental to the interests of the United States, but I do not think they can be dismissed out of hand.

[1]: http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Corporations/Foreign-Account-T...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...

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philwelch12y ago

> there is not really a concept of "citizenship" for individual US states

Yes there is. The Fourteenth Amendment clearly states:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

logicallee12y ago

Of course they can be dismissed. What you're not getting is that these people have to pay full taxes in the place they're actually living. A place you're not living has no business collecting further taxes from you.

marteyOP12y ago

> What you're not getting is that these people have to pay full taxes in the place they're actually living.

In that case, they can claim a "Foreign Earned Income Exclusion" [1] which reduces or eliminates their American tax liability for up to $97,600 of income that they are "paying full taxes" on.

> A place you're not living has no business collecting further taxes from you.

As other comments have noted, just because you are not living in the United States does not mean that you are not materially benefiting from citizenship. Despite living abroad, you can still vote, travel to and from the United States, and take advantage of US diplomatic representation in case of arrest.

[1]: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Forei...

auctiontheory12y ago

As has already been stated many, many times, for most Americans living abroad who are not super-rich, the issue isn't the taxation - it's the complexity (and associated penalties) of the reporting requirements.

Basically, the US government's attitude toward Americans living outside the US, much like the US attitude toward non-Americans wherever they live, is "F* You."

Perhaps you think that this attitude is somehow justified. As a US citizen myself, I think that it is detrimental to long-term US interests.

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