The Long Arm Of The American Tax System
This story from the BBC entitled Goodbye, US Passport, caught my eye, as it was top of the BBC’s most read list this morning. It’s about US citizens living abroad, giving up their citizenship.
The number of Americans giving up their citizenship has rocketed this year – partly, it’s thought, because of a new tax law that is frustrating many expats.
Some examples are given, where Americans living in countries like Germany and Scandinavia are having to spend several thousand dollars with professional advisors just to fill in the complicated tax form required. And then they are not actually paying any tax!
Would you give up your British citizenship, if say you wanted to live in Italy and the British government wanted you to fill in a complicated tax form, so you could be taxed on things that are nothing to do with the UK at all?
Years ago, I was in Denver at a conference and about seven of us of different nationalities, all sat down and discussed the tax we paid. It was strange some of the taxes that in those days Americans paid. One guy who lived in Virginia, always ran an old car, as he had to pay a yearly property tax on his vehicle to the state.
In the end we came to the conclusion, that if you added up the cost of national and local taxes, property taxes and the cost of healthcare, schooling and universities, there wasn’t great differences between anywhere in the developed world.
I suspect it’s not much different now, if you take one of your average 2.4 families, where the parents do normal jobs.
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The Anonymous Widower 
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