Thursday, September 5, 2013

 

I was up early this morning to talk to Tezza, but since she had to have coffee with her sister causing our together time to be cut, I chose to read the news.  Of course the Syria crisis and Putin v. Obama held the front page, as did the suicide of Ariel Castro.  But what really caught my eye was the spike in the number of Americans choosing to give up their citizenship.  CNN is saying that some of the rush could be caused by the new disclosure requirements in our tax laws.  But I cannot help but wonder if that's the whole story.  I believe many things are influencing this decision, besides tax laws.  Maybe our government's inability to balance a budget for the last...how many years?  Maybe it's the huge deficit or the shadow of another war.  Then again, maybe it's because we are slowly losing our world leader status in the global view.

I did notice that most of the people giving up their citizenship "for tax purposes" were not just the wealthy few (like one of the founders of Facebook) but ordinary, run-of-the-mill citizens who have tried to save for retirement in offshore accounts or have retirement funds that will be taxed under the new laws.  Some of these people are ex-patriots who have to file in both America and the country in which they find themselves living.  The cost of filing in both countries is dear, and with these new tax laws, they are losing the "breaks" that having these overseas accounts first rendered.  

But this has got to be a real emotional break for some, or I would imagine it would be.  You still sound American, you have the American culture ingrained in you, especially if you were born and raised here.  How can you not be considered American?  I surely don't know if I could do it, though in this day and age with the government as corrupt as it appears to be, with big business running things, where the rich get richer and the poor increase in volume yearly, where we seem to have lost sight of what is important (the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few), where our government doesn't seem to be working for the people anymore....maybe jumping the American ship isn't such a bad option and the only thing some of us can do to survive. 



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