http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=167530
American Expats' Tax Nightmare
http://online.wsj.com/articles/kuenzi-american-expats-tax-nightmare-1404924705
Some years ago the Great One bought some cases of the Internal Revenue Code and advertised them for sale as Satan's Bible. The irony was funny at the time even though tax evil was already quite advanced and troublesome. Nowadays it would be hard for any atheist to deny his description.
My expat friends all got involved in exploring alternative countries and modes of asset protection years ago when things were easy and delightfully private. The fedgov's Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) and similar forms of legal sadism started as topics of minor concern among them, but have grown to a frequent subject of headlines in the major media. It is that drastic a development.
The fact that the Wall Street Journal is the source of today's article seems pretty significant. I have no foreign assets; no doubt most of you don't. I'm assuming that most readers of the Wall Street Journal aren't even in that category,.but in the opinion of the Journal (it and I agree on something for a change) everyone should find these latest details extremely alarming: if Washington will treat this subgroup of the population that bad, especially when most are merely guilty of trying to remain solvent, what will they do to whatever group oneself is part of?
Get this passage from the article and tell me you don't think it's pure sadism and a bald-faced attempt at mass entrapment:
U.S. reporting rules for non-U.S. registered mutual funds are a particularly good example of the problem. An American family living in Germany that buys five or six different German-domiciled mutual funds to create a diversified portfolio is faced with tax complications that almost defy belief. They will have to report each of their six non-U.S. mutual funds on separate forms, every year. The IRS Instruction manual for this Form 8621 estimates that the time needed to prepare the form include "Recordkeeping, 15 hr., 4 min; Learning about the law or the form, 11 hr., 13 min; Preparing and sending the form to the IRS 20 hr., 21 min."
In other words, the U.S. government expects this family to spend more than 200 hours annually preparing and filing the forms necessary to report their six mutual funds bought from a local German investment advisor. Furthermore, once the filing is made, the tax payers will find their investment gains taxed annually and subject to a tax rate no less than 39.6%, and potentially much higher.
I hope every sector of the population from Rastafarians to bridge players to haute cuisine chefs to plumbers sees this writing on the wall, because the bell tolls for them too. Besides the other qualities I mentioned, this new aggression has to be a trial balloon, a test on a sample group to see whether it will rebel. If it doesn't, and it's a fairly sure thing it won't, the feds and IRS will know that everybody is ready to be put through the meat grinder in exciting new ways.
Will such advances take the form of stealing a tenth of everybody's domestic bank accounts -- a "haircut" as it was insultingly called in Cyprus, a "bail-in" as it's more suavely known here? Or maybe they'll just multiply by another tenfold the bureaucratic paperwork people already have to put up with. A friend who's driven without a license for 16 years says you have to give your whole life story to apply for one nowadays, and do just about everything short of chopping off an ear and handing it to them for a DNA sample.
The famous Martin Niemoeller quote "First they came for the Socialists" has tragic irony here. Socialists? That's the precise perpetrators we're talking about here in 2014 ameriKa! An updated and starkly honest version might read
First they came for the Amish, and I did not speak out -- I was not Amish. Then they came for the "anti-Semites, and I did not speak out -- I was not an "anti-semite". Then they came for the expatriates and I did not speak out -- I'm not a member of the jet set that I vaguely imagine them to be. But then they came for everybody else on a similarly trumped-up rationale, and now Lenin's defining dream of destroying the middle class is complete.
They did come for the Amish -- remember? Make that they have, repeatedly -- and the Amish have prevailed against them for centuries. But I believe their resistance isn't what it used to be either as the heady days of moral combat during our colonial and pre-Revolutionary days become an ever more distant memory.
Didja hear the latest? "Lakers acquire Jeremy Lin from Rockets!" That must be what's really important, because it's what the sheeple think about most.
/\/.\/\/.
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