Comment by crdb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crdb | Hacker News Reader

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The key is to look at the current budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_States_federal_bud...

It can be split into three families of spending:

- defense, which benefits you globally via Pax Americana, free trade routes etc. and should you require it, "Captain Phillips" style rescue.

- "socialism", in the form of benefits that everybody has to pay for and that you can receive if you trigger certain situations (retirement, unemployment, etc.). Most expatriated Americans probably already benefitted from free education which is included here.

- "generally making the country locally better" (justice, environment, etc.).

Of these, only the latter doesn't directly impact Americans abroad. The first benefits you wherever you are; foreign citizen somewhat benefit from Pax Americana but there is no guarantee it will continue, whilst US citizen are covered globally with much more certainty. The second is a form of compulsory insurance for life developments that will probably coincide with repatriation. But that's about 7% of the budget (rough back of the envelope).

The question is why don't other countries tax their citizen abroad? I think it is mainly because they can't afford to enforce it (good luck, Estonia, forcing JP Morgan to give you access to their New York client data). If they could, with any degree of certainty, they would in a heartbeat. France proposes to do it every 6 months.

- defense, which benefits you globally via Pax Americana,

This is, to put it mildly, a controversial claim.

- Most expatriated Americans probably already benefitted from free education which is included here.

When I point out the insanity of the law that denies free choice of public schools, its defenders usually try to justify it by saying schools are funded by local property tax rather than national income tax. Is this not the case?

Pax Americana started in WWII (which killed over 55 million people) and since then, there has been no global conflict of a similar scale. Cf http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/massacre.html (top result in DDG).

Whether you consider that global relatively free trade is not beneficial to the rest of the world is up to you, but as a citizen of the rest of the world who did benefit I'm quite glad the US did not go isolationist after WWII.

Regarding schools, whether the taxpayer's money is used appropriately is another discussion, irrelevant here since Americans, through their elected representatives, chose to spent the money in this way.

Funding-wise, last year's budget spent $100bn and this year wants $117bn on the Federal end for "Education, Training, Employment and Social Services" (see link above) of which $69bn in 2015 is for Education (see: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/obama-administration-2...).

Ah, education is an interesting point.

The question is why don't other countries tax their citizen abroad?

I assumed that the general consensus was that it all balances out at the end of the day – countries don't tax their citizens abroad, but do tax noncitizen residents who have income in the country. Either approach isn't all that bad, but it's interesting to think about how it can realistically be handled where individuals can hold multiple citizenships. My partner is dual US/UK, and completing a US tax return when you haven't lived in the country in decades is expensive and time-consuming.

>foreign citizen somewhat benefit from Pax Americana but there is no guarantee it will continue, whilst US citizen are covered globally with much more certainty

Tell that to the lybian, syrian, iraki, Salvadoran, etc... that have "benefited" from the "Pax" Americana

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