[jmadsen]

I wish the title of the article better reflected the real point - explained in the article itself - instead of saying "escape tax rules", with all the implications

The fact is, more and more of us with solid middle-class incomes and perfectly normal lives are becoming increasingly concerned about laws that are poorly explained and advertised to us, but with huge potential penalties if we go unaware of them. These are exclusive to people living in other countries - if they imposed some of these on non-expatriates, there would be a riot.

It is becoming a very stressful burden.

[philiphodgen]

The paperwork burden caused by poorly known and viciously complex tax rules is probably the first reason people give me for cancelling citizenship. Especially since the US government seems hellbent on imposing astonishingly large penalties for paperwork failures.

The risk is too large for middle class people.

The second tax reason people give is the estate tax.

[electromagnetic]

A family friend ran into this. She lived in Canada nearly all her working life and only heard about having to file paperwork with the US when it was being announced there was going to be a crackdown due to the recession.

Fortunately between her and her husband they had enough money to get a good lawyer and get it sorted out before they tried to nail her for all the tax she owed.

I think the biggest issue with the "tax by citizenship" is that it turns US citizenship into a commodity to be traded for personal benefit.

It's noble to try to chase the tax dodgers, but it's a lot more practical to tax the people who stay and ensure anybody who wants to flee is going to be losing sizeable amounts of their property.

Canada has investment rules based on nationality/citizenship and the owners of those shares can't just elope and expect to keep their controlling interests. In fact most of the big companies that face these rules have their foreign investments near maximum, so that anyone fleeing would be forced to sell all their stake and selling a big stake of any company means selling at a sizeable loss.