With the elections inching ever closer we’ll all soon be hit with a barrage of social media posts and empty threats should it play out this way or that. This very moment your weird uncle who’s pro-Trump might be be drafting a Facebook post about leaving the country if Bernie wins the ticket. (He won’t leave. They never leave.)
That same point was brought up in a post from the The Fix, which examines a recent study that found a greater number of Americans are renouncing their citizenship for "non-political but more likely financial reasons."
In a super shady log published by the Federal Register, the Internal Revenue Service lists every person losing his or her United States citizenship as of last quarter, which ended September 30, 2015. Apparently the number of people saying "nah" to being American is at an all-time high.
From the Washington Post:
"Many, many more Americans officially renounce their U.S. citizenship each year than leave the United States and ask for political asylum. In 2014, the first group was about 18 times larger than the later. All told, 3,415 Americans renounced their citizenship for what were likely financial reasons -- a record figure. Just 188 citizens sought asylum in another country."
Why not simply leave and let live without all the fuss of becoming an official expatriate? The Post points out that "U.S. citizens living abroad are required to pay to the U.S. government taxes on their worldwide income." And that’s a bummer, so they’re typically just paying the flat $2,350 administrative processing fee and peacing.
We can only dream that a mass exodus of tea party supporters will take those open threats elsewhere.
